John D. Barry

“No...I knew a Martin.And was he wiley?If there was one thing he wasn't was wiley, John.Oh?Poor Martin was an inordinately stupid man. He could barely tie his shoelaces.A ha'penny short?Ah listen. Martin kept animals had more wile in them.What kind of animals?He'd sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they'd have been wind-bothered up that way.They'd have been...Bothered, John. By the wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle.Unseat them?Cornelius lowers his sad eyes -In the mind.You mean you'd have a cow'd take a turn?Cornelius squares his jaw.Do you realise you're looking at a man who's seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? Purposefully.On account of?Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it.””

“I didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” I didn’t hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn’t going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that.””

“Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics”