Isaiah 11:6 – “And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,

And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,

And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;

And a little boy will lead them.”

Scotland, 1827

Nayah was dead. 

She was alive before the shepherd boy had fallen asleep. She was young, just under a year old, but she was sick. She kept to herself in the herd and, as the boy had observed, she only ate a quarter of her usual clover. Border disease, his older brother thought; it must have been passed down. Ewes were prone to these kinds of illnesses when they were weaned off from their mothers too soon, or rejected at birth. 

“Fickle creatures,” Father always said as he chewed his tobacco in the morning. “Fickle fucking creatures. Can’t do shit to survive without us.” 

The boy didn’t think sheep were fickle. He housed Nayah in the empty old barn to monitor her symptoms; he hand-fed her a blend of clover and softened corn that she suckled out of his palms. The old barn remained vacant at the edge of Father’s two hundred acres. Father never told him why, and the boy never asked.

Nayah seemed to be improving this week. Her legs regained strength just enough to stand in her pen. Though she wouldn’t walk around or paw absentmindedly at the ground like she used to; nor would she kick her legs like a toddler might, full of her usual kittenish fire. Instead, she would stare at the wooden wall, baying incessantly. 

The boy was adamant about Nayah’s recovery. 

After all, he had helped deliver her. He spent hours kneeling in the pen, watching her mother snort through contractions until Nayah emerged, beaming like a red gem in the early morning sun.  

Now, however, she lay on the ground like a smothered poppy, the life bled out of her frame. 

The boy felt dizziness circle behind his eyes and closed them. When he peered through his lashes again, the ewe was still dead, and his nerves were still cutting like barbed wire into his organs.

The boy crumbled to his knees. He seized Nayah’s corpse and hugged her close, burying his face in her back, the part of her that was untainted. Their bodies collectively shook as he cried, the sound cloaked in wool. Outside, the clouds rolled in armies of gray. They stretched like fog over the farmland, and rain finally began to fall.

Nayah’s corpse became a refuge, and the boy couldn’t imagine letting her go for a second; as long as he was touching her, she was still alive. They both were.

His voice escaped as a smothered hum: “Nayah, please forgive me.”

He prayed in his head. He shouted at God to bring her back, then recoiled into her when thunder roared in response. 

How would he tell Father? There weren’t many sheep left after the bobcats visited. They hopped the pen last month and dragged ewe corpses to the forest, leaving nothing but tufts of wool clinging to the barley leaves. There would be no excuse for this, no possible alibi, nothing to tether him to innocence. 

Father hand-delivered his wrath that night. He beat the boy until he went limp by the fire. The boy watched the flames lick away into nothing but dead embers before finally arising to give it more wood. His temples ached, his nose bled into his mouth, and his hands trembled as he tossed the logs into the ashes. 

“You need light for it to do its job, Hammill,” said Blair, striding into the foyer.

His older brother took a last puff of his cigarette and tossed it into the hearth. The spark ate at the wood until the flames crimsoned. Blair peered down at Hammill, the brim of his straw hat shadowing his eyes. He stared at him for a long while, his lips twitching when he sized up Hammill’s bloody demeanor.

“What’d you do, eejit?”

Hammill croaked a frail sound but failed to speak. Blair backhanded him across the cheek, sending him to the hardwood. He stayed there this time.

“Eejit, where’s your sister?”

Hammill felt a splinter impale his cheek when he spoke, “With Eigra.”

“The maid came back? Thought she ran off with that boy.”

“She came back. I think she’s taking care of our sister.”

Blair snorted and left the foyer. Hammill watched the highest flame climb to the top of the logs while the others bent and twisted around it. The smell of Blair’s cigarette filled his nose with dying herbs. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t fall asleep. 

***

Mother was buried at the beginning of the moorland, less than an acre from where the barley grew. Hammill visited her timely at dawn and plucked wildflowers along the way. He decorated her cross grave marker with them, braiding the primrose and harebell onto the splintering wood so they appeared as if they were growing outward. 

Father nor Blair ever came along. Hammill thought they had forgotten about her years ago; they didn’t possess enough spirit to make the trek. 

The last time they saw Mother was when Blair was digging the hole. Hammill was cradling Euna, their newborn sister, and Father was dropping Mother’s swollen, wool-covered body into the pit. Nobody cried, not even Euna. She was silent, suckling her bonnet strings, her little blue eyes cast toward the ether.

On the walk home from Mother’s grave, the morning after Nayah died, Hammill saw Blair chopping firewood by the shed. He approached him.

“Have you seen Father?” Hammill asked as Blair’s axe hurtled toward the oak.

Blair shook his head, dabbing the sweat beading on his upper lip. He tossed the axe toward Hammill’s feet.

“Sharpen this.”

Blair sauntered off, fingering the cigarette in his pocket until it came loose. 

Hammill took the axe to the shed and ran the whetstone back and forth until the morning sun reflected a sharpened edge. When he left the shed with the axe resting in his palms—Blair was nowhere to be found. A murder of crows perched high in the oaks, plotting together in shrill caws. Hammill shuffled further into the meadow. 

“Brother?”

Something waded through the brush a foot away, rustling the stem grass. Hammill turned. A growl hummed low, rumbling in his chest. Hammill caught a glimpse of an amber tuft shadowing the greenery, and before his trembling hands could properly wield Blair’s axe, a bobcat leaped from its camouflage. It pounced upon Hammill, sending him back toward the earth, which he met with a cry. The predator slashed his cheek, its claws peeling away at his skin until all he could feel and see was his blood. 

“Brother!”

The axe had fallen from his grip and laid just a foot away. Hammill kicked feverishly, and when the bobcat recoiled with a yelp, he scrambled in the grass and seized the axe. Screaming, Hammill hurled it at the animal, bounding toward him with bared teeth and eyes akin to voids. He struck the creature in the neck, and it wailed something human, something familiar, before succumbing to the earth. The bobcat’s blood freckled Hammill from the artery he had struck, its amber fur tainted as it lay collapsed on the dirt.

Hammill crumbled to his knees, watching as the bobcat’s sides became slow in their breaths. It snorted, and something gurgled in the back of its throat, something akin to language, before stilling completely. 

Hammill pressed his face into his hands and wailed over the dead bobcat.

“Please, God, tell me what have you done with my brother!”

The sky was soundless, and Hammill wondered if God had finally heard him.

He looked up and whispered, “Oh, Lord, please forgive me…” 

The boy wiped his nose on the back of his hand and looked down at the dead animal. He thought of Nayah and pressed his eyes shut. There would be no more rest. He stood up, removed the axe from the creature’s neck, and dragged the bobcat into the meadow. He curled up next to the shed and watched from a distance as the crows fled from their high homage to peck at the body. He drifted away into sleep between the crow’s caws and their rhythmic tearing of flesh.

***

Mother had a fatal birth inside the old barn. Father wanted it to happen outside the house because it would be messy, he said, like a slaughter. Hammill was there, and so was their maid, Eigra. Mother cried so loud the boy had to stuff wool in his ears to be near her. He knelt beside her, doubting how messy it could become, until the blood. It was everywhere. Over the cot of hay she laid on, over the dirt floors, over Eigra’s arms.

With her knees bloody and spread, Mother screamed not for God, but at God. She did it for hours until her throat no longer allowed. 

“She will not make it, child,” Eigra spoke when Mother fell unconscious. “Go find your Father. You do not need to see this.”

But Hammill stayed. A minute before Mother’s heart gave out, he was dabbing the sweat from her forehead and thinking of how Father would react, how scared he would be to see Mother red and screaming. To give life wasn’t almighty, but terrifying and horrible. Maybe that’s what Father meant when he talked of the lambs.

When Mother died, little Euna was pulled from her womb. 

She was a terror from the start: incessantly bawling, thrashing in her cradle, waking Hammill in the middle of the night. Eigra would nurse her, allowing Euna to suck on her breasts for the little milk held within them. Euna was five months old when Eigra ran away with the farmer boy from the plantation across the quarry. Father tasked Hammill to care for the baby: feed her, clean her, house her, put her to bed, and keep her tame. 

Six days later, Euna fell ill. 

Hammill took her to the old barn to cool her fever; he started a fire to warm them throughout the night. Euna rapidly became short of breath, gurgling terrible outcries. He bottle-fed her cow’s milk and rocked her for hours until his eyelids could no longer remain open, and he fell asleep by the fire.

When he woke up to the roosters calling, Nayah was limp on the dirt, her neck mangled, and Euna was nowhere to be found. Hammill sobbed and prayed for Euna to return, foretelling how Father would react to a dead ewe and a lost sister. 

“Eigra, please tell me you returned and found her,” Hammill said, looking to the barn's roof. “Take care of her, and please forgive me.”

***

When Hammill came to beside the shed, the sky had grown dark, and the day’s clouds had wooled over the moon. The bobcat’s body lay still in the meadow. The chilled winds stung against the slashes on Hammill’s cheeks, fanning the blood to dried flakes. He stumbled toward the house that sat stark with light against the rest of the phantom plantation. 

Hammill pushed open the door to his home and called, “Father?”

Silence settled further. The hearth was out, but the candles remained lit. Eigra was always the one to light them; nobody had completed the task since she left a week ago. Hammill approached the vat of chilled well water in the kitchen and pressed some onto his face, wincing at the pinching in his wounds. 

He took a torch from the wall by the postern door and held it to a candle until it engulfed itself. He walked outside.

“Father?” he called again. 

The farm was festering with a silence that was unlike itself. No lambs bayed, no chickens squabbled, no pigs squealed from their muddy pens. The barn at the edge of Father’s two hundred acres glowed with the half-glint of a smothered star, dwindling with that same silence. Hammill took his torch and headed toward it. 

As he neared the barn, he finally heard voices. There were three of them, and they all blended as they spoke, morphing in and out of unison phrases, pushing back on one another as if in a fight. When he halted at the barn’s panel door, the voices ceased. He pushed it open, and tarrying in the center of the flame’s light, was Father. He looked grim, sick in the way his mouth hung slightly lax. The front of his shirt was untucked, and his hands were caked in maroon. In between them laid Euna’s corpse, turned limply on her side where Hammill had left Nayah’s this morning.

“Father,” the boy said through a gasp. “The bobcats have returned. I don’t know where brother—”

“Devil,” said Father, stepping forward. “You cursed this farm.” 

Hammill paled.

“F-Father, please help me understand—”

“You dare beg for yourself as she lay dead between us?”

Hammill looked down at Euna’s body. The torch trembled in his hands as he said, “I failed, Father. She was ill, I fell asleep, and while I did, the bobcats must have come again and—”

“Your mother perished with you here,” Father interrupted, aiming a crooked finger at Hammill. “You let your sister get maimed, you slaughtered your brother with his own axe, and now you are here, back in the barn, to kill me, too. Is that it, Hammill?”

Hammill fell to his knees. 

“Father, no!” he cried with the torch between his quivering fingers. “I don’t know where they are, and I was just trying to find them!”

“Well,” Father said, his face sunken, “It seems like you have.” 

Father stepped to the side, revealing the body of Blair slumped over the frayed hay barrels. His neck lay crooked, almost completely lost in the bloodied gash that had all but dried to an empty cavern from the axe. 

Hammill wailed, dropping the torch as he pressed his forehead to the dirt.

“Please! I was only trying to salvage—”

“Look upon your sister and brother and see!” Father shouted. “See who you made them to be.” 

The torch’s flame caught hay, evolving taller with Father’s words. Hammill cried again until that was all he could hear. God wasn’t near, the boy knew; there was only the life He ignored down here, abandoned as the most fickle of His creations. 

The fire began to eat toward the hayloft; the barn grew swollen with smoke. Hammill raised his head, and when his vision refocused, Father was no longer there. The flames where he once stood twisted and flapped, dissolving away the wood. 

The boy scrambled to his feet while a crow cawed from the rafters above and dove at him. Its curved talons curled into Hammill’s collarbones, lacerating his flesh to open wounds. 

Hammill took cover against the floor again, crying as he collided with the body of his little sister. Euna was motionless underneath him; the barn was becoming an oven. He crawled with her corpse toward the back of the barn, where Blair’s haystack was beginning to catch fire. 

The crow became trapped in the collapsing rafters and screeched when its feathers fell from its back; it collapsed within the inferno, and its corpse burned. 

Before the fire could scorch Hammill, he took hold of his brother’s arm and yanked him and Euna with every ounce of his might toward the panel door. The old barn’s roof was crippling inward, spitting pieces of wood toward the charring dirt. The boy thrust himself into the night, choking on his coughs as he dragged the corpses of his siblings behind him. 

Hammill made for the moorland. He heaved the bodies through the growing barley, his teeth gritted as the barn’s crackling became distant, and his arms labored with ache. He hiccuped in relief when he reached Mother’s grave marker and collapsed in front of her cross. 

“Mother, please understand,” said Hammill. “I must get Father first.”

Hammill staggered again toward the smoking barn. Father lay beneath the rubble of what would have been the panel door. His body was unidentifiable; he calcined to a black feather-like husk. Hammill hooked his arms under Father’s shoulders and hauled his corpse back over the barley’s crooked path. The night was dark, and the moon did not show, but Hammill knew where he was.

He dropped Father between Euna and Blair on the hill and laid upon Mother’s grave above them, curling into the fetal position. 

“I only wanted to bring us together,” Hammill said. “I never meant to maim, and I never meant to fall asleep. I only wanted God to show me what to do, but He was silent. Do you know why, Mother?”

Nobody was there but the single female sheep that climbed the moorland hill. She laid beside Hammill upon her clean wool. The shepherd boy embraced her, quivering, and slept.