Sheepey

The truth cannot be found in words.
So take this book with a grain of salt.

Science & the Cult of Personality

The sheep didn’t care about Stonehenge.

They were right there — maybe fifty yards from the path, a whole flock of them dotting the green like cotton balls someone had tossed across a pool table. Thousands of years of history on one side of the fence and a bunch of sheep on the other, eating grass, doing absolutely nothing, unbothered by the fact that they were neighbors with the most famous rocks on Earth.

The stones were bigger than she’d expected — not taller, but heavier, like they’d been there so long the ground had grown up around them. Grey and rough-skinned, spotted with lichen the color of rust. The wind came off the plain in flat steady sheets that pushed her curls sideways and smelled like grass and chalk and something older she couldn’t name. A roped path looped around the monument and tourists shuffled along it with audio guides pressed to their ears, nodding at rocks.

Persefoni elbowed Kathleen and nodded toward the sheep. “They look so bored. Like — congratulations, you live next to Stonehenge. Could not care less.”

“They look like us in Mr. Henley’s class.”

“Oh my God, they do. That one is literally you. Look at her face. She’s like — I cannot believe this is my life.”

“That’s not me. That’s you. I actually pay attention.”

“You pay attention to Alejandro.”

Kathleen shoved her, and Persefoni laughed, and her dad turned around on the path ahead — all six-four of him, hands on his hips like a disappointed monument — and gave them the look, the one that meant I paid for this trip and you will appreciate these rocks — and they both straightened up and put on serious faces for approximately four seconds before Kathleen whispered “baaaa” and they lost it again.

Kathleen wasn’t family, but she might as well have been. She’d been Persefoni’s best friend since second grade, when Persefoni had moved to Beaverton from Pensacola and showed up at school knowing nobody and a girl with auburn hair falling in her face and the brightest hazel eyes she’d ever seen had sat next to her at lunch without being asked. She’d been sleeping over on weekends since they were eight. Her dad called her “my other daughter.” Her mom packed her lunches too. They’d brought her to England the way they’d bring Persefoni’s sister, if she’d had one — because it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone not to.

Alejandro was walking with Kathleen, her hand in his, reading every informational plaque they passed. He was taller than both of them but built like he’d forgotten to use his body for anything physical, with curly brown hair and a vintage corduroy blazer that was doing its best. He’d been talking to her dad about the acoustic properties of the stones for the last twenty minutes — leaning forward on the path to catch her dad’s ear, Kathleen drifting along beside him like a patient anchor — something about how the bluestones had been carried two hundred miles from Wales because of the way they rang when you struck them, like bells, and how the ancient builders might have chosen them for their sound rather than their appearance. Her dad was asking good questions, or at least questions that sounded good. He had that gift — making whoever he was talking to feel like the most important person in the room. He’d been doing it for her mom for twenty years and he’d do it for a fifteen-year-old kid explaining rocks if that’s what the moment called for. Alejandro was Kathleen’s boyfriend — had been for about a year, since Alejandro was fourteen — and her dad treated him like a son he’d been issued by the state of Oregon. She could see what it did to him — the way he leaned in when her dad talked, the way he lit up when her dad asked him questions. His own parents were academics whose house felt like a library with a kitchen. Her dad asked how his day was and actually listened to the answer.

“They’re like instruments,” Alejandro said, turning back to the girls. He was talking to both of them but looking at Persefoni. “The whole monument is like an instrument. They didn’t build it to look at. They built it to listen to.”

“That’s kind of beautiful,” Persefoni said. “Like a church made out of sound.”

Alejandro stopped walking. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what it is.” He was looking at her the way he looked at a poem that surprised him — like she’d said something he’d been circling without landing on. Kathleen was holding his hand. Kathleen had been holding his hand the entire walk. And Persefoni had just, without trying, without meaning to, said the thing that lit him up.

“Babe, come look at this one,” Kathleen said, pulling Alejandro toward a plaque about the solstice alignment, and the moment passed the way moments like that always passed between the three of them — quickly, without acknowledgment, like a cloud crossing the sun.

Her mom — Rosemary — was taking photos. Barely five-two, blonde, small enough that her dad could pick her up with one arm and sometimes did, she took photos of everything — the stones, the sky, the informational signs, the gift shop from the outside, the gift shop from the inside, a bench. She’d post them all to Facebook later — she always did — with captions that were slightly wrong in ways that made Persefoni want to scream and also hug her. Stonehinge is truly amazing! Built by the Druids 5000 years ago! It wasn’t built by the Druids and it wasn’t five thousand years old — or maybe it was, Persefoni wasn’t sure, and that uncertainty would bother her if she thought about it, so she didn’t.

Up ahead on the path, her dad had his arm around her mom’s shoulders — she’d gotten cold, and he’d noticed before she had, the way he always did. Her dad — George — was the biggest person in most rooms. Dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, with a jaw like something carved and the kind of handsome that made people at restaurants look up from their food when he walked past. And he did everything. The grocery shopping and the laundry and the bills and the driving and the planning and the deciding. He made dinner most nights and packed Persefoni’s lunch every morning — turkey and swiss, apple slices, a note she pretended to be embarrassed by — and knew which of her mom’s sweaters could go in the dryer and which couldn’t and never once in Persefoni’s memory had he complained about any of it. She’d watched for it. She’d never caught him. Her mom was the most beautiful woman in the world — he said it all the time, had been saying it since before Persefoni was born, said it the way other men talked about their football teams.

And her mom — her mom tried. Cookies for the neighbors that she’d burn and remake and burn again. Cards for birthdays she barely remembered in time. Volunteering at things she’d forget to show up to. She was kind the way some people were tall — it was just the first thing Persefoni noticed about her, had always noticed, even at seven. But she couldn’t balance a checkbook. She couldn’t figure out the TV remote. When the internet went out she’d stand in front of the router and stare at it like it was a riddle from God. Her dad would come home and fix it in ten seconds and she’d say “my hero,” the same way every time, same look on her face, same words — Persefoni could have mouthed them along with her — and he’d glow.

Persefoni had grown up in this. In a house where her dad handled everything and her mom was the most beautiful woman in the world and that was just how it worked. Where being beautiful and kind was enough and the details got taken care of. Her dad would carry her backpack if she asked. Her mom would say yes to anything. Life, so far, had been pretty great.

The gift shop was where it happened.

It was small and overlit, crammed with keychains and tea towels and the particular smell of new plastic that every tourist shop on Earth seemed to share. She wasn’t looking for anything. She drifted past a display case and caught her reflection — wind-wrecked curls gone reddish under the warm museum lights, brown skin turned gold, the pale green eyes everyone always noticed first. She looked away. She was killing time while Alejandro finished reading every plaque in the exhibit — he was taking notes in his phone, actually taking notes, and Kathleen was leaning against a wall next to him with the patient expression of a girl who had learned that loving Alejandro meant waiting for Alejandro to finish reading things. Her mom was buying postcards. Her dad was buying her mom a cup of tea, bent practically in half to hear her over the register, more than a foot of height between them and neither of them seeming to mind.

And there, on a shelf between a Stonehenge keychain and a book about ley lines, was a small stuffed sheep. Black wool, black face, barely three inches tall, with little legs sticking out at optimistic angles and a grin on his face that could only be described as sheepish — a grin that said I know something you don’t, but I’m too polite to say what.

They both saw him at the same time.

“Oh my God,” Kathleen said.

“I need him,” Persefoni said.

“You need him immediately.”

“Daddy.”

Her dad turned. He was already reaching for his wallet. He’d been reaching for his wallet since she was born.

“That one. The sheep. Please.”

He bought it without looking at the price, because her dad never looked at the price of anything his daughter wanted, and handed it to her, and she held it up to Kathleen, and Kathleen gasped and pressed her hands to her face and said “oh my God he’s adorable” and Persefoni said “he’s perfect” and that was the moment Sheepey was born.

“His name,” Persefoni announced, holding him at eye level and studying his little grin, “is Sheepey.” She said it the way a French person might — shee-PAY — with a gravity that implied centuries of noble lineage.

Kathleen didn’t miss a beat. “Sheepey,” she repeated, in a British accent that was actually pretty good. “From Stone-HENGE.” She leaned on the second syllable the way the British did, like the word was a fancy door you had to push open from the back end.

“Stonehenge,” Persefoni confirmed. “Very old place.”

“Very old. Very distinguished.”

“Bit of a drinker, though.”

“Oh, terrible. Absolutely terrible drinker. Can’t hold his lager.”

“And the gambling.”

“The gambling. Don’t even get me started on the gambling.”

“He’s lost two estates.”

“Three. Three estates and a yacht.”

“Sheepey doesn’t have a yacht.”

“He used to. He gambled it away. Do keep up.”

“He lost them with dignity,” Kathleen said, and something about the way she said it — the pause before dignity, the absolute seriousness, the way her chin lifted as if she were defending a client in court — made Persefoni stop walking. Because that was funnier than anything Persefoni had said. The dignity. The insistence on dignity. It was the whole joke turned inside out — not the gambling or the drinking but the sheep’s stubborn belief that he was still a gentleman despite all available evidence. Kathleen had found the center of Sheepey in one sentence without seeming to try.

They were in full British accent now, both of them, building Sheepey’s biography with the speed and precision of two people who had been doing exactly this kind of thing since they were seven years old. By the time they got back to the car, Sheepey had a gambling debt, a fondness for single malt, a disgraced military career, an ex-wife named Tabitha who’d left him for a goat farmer in Devon, and a deep and abiding melancholy that he masked with charm.

The walk back to the car took them past the sheep again — same field, same fence, same total disinterest in human affairs. The wind had picked up and the sky was fading from blue to grey at the edges, the way English skies did, like someone slowly pulling a blanket over the world.

Kathleen stopped at the fence. “Look,” she said, pointing at one of the sheep — not at the sheep itself but at the way its shadow fell on the grass, elongated and strange in the low light. “He looks like two sheep. The real one and the long one.” Nobody else had noticed this. Persefoni looked and saw what Kathleen saw — the real sheep eating grass and its long dark twin stretched across the field beneath it — and for a moment the image was the most interesting thing in England.

The rental was too small for five people — some boxy little thing with right-hand drive that her dad had been swearing at quietly since Heathrow. Persefoni had the window behind her mom, Kathleen was in the middle, and Alejandro was behind her dad with his knees nearly in his chest. Sheepey sat on Kathleen’s knee between the two of them like a dignitary awaiting his motorcade.

Her dad tried the accent from the driver’s seat. “Well, Sheepey ol’ chap,” he said, in something that sounded like a British person being swallowed by rural Alabama, “welcome to the family.”

“Dad. No.”

“What?”

“You cannot do that accent.”

“I thought it was pretty good.”

“It was not pretty good.”

Her mom tried next. It was worse. It was so much worse. It was British by way of the Florida panhandle, every vowel bent in directions vowels were never meant to go. “Cheerio, Sheep-EYE!” she said, beaming.

“Mom. It’s Sheepey. Shee-PAY.”

“That’s what I said. Sheep-EYE.”

“No — listen — Shee. Pay.”

“Sheep-EYE.” Her mom looked genuinely confused. “What am I saying wrong?”

Kathleen put her hand on Persefoni’s arm. “She can’t hear it.”

“She literally cannot hear it.”

“Sheep-EYE!” her mom said again, delighted with herself.

“Pip pip!” said her dad.

“Oh my God,” said Kathleen.

“Brilliant!” said her mom, who had apparently learned the word from a BBC show and had been waiting for a chance to use it.

Persefoni looked at Kathleen. Kathleen looked at Persefoni. Sheepey looked at nothing, because he was a stuffed animal, but if he could have looked at something it would have been the window, because Sheepey was the kind of man who stared out of car windows and thought about the choices he’d made.

“This is going to be a long trip,” Kathleen said, in her own voice.

“The longest,” Persefoni said.

The laughter settled. Her dad turned up the radio. Her mom went back to her phone. And in the quiet that followed, Alejandro — wedged between Kathleen and the door — was watching Persefoni with that half-smile he got sometimes. He was always doing that. Watching her like she was a puzzle he was almost done solving. Kathleen didn’t seem to notice. She never seemed to notice.

But she was smiling. She had her best friend and her parents and a stuffed sheep with a drinking problem and the English countryside was sliding past the window like a painting being slowly unrolled, and she was sixteen years old, and nothing bad had ever happened to her, and she was pretty sure nothing ever would.