George Glenn and Kate Glenn

George Glenn and Kate Glenn’s marriage is remembered as a bond marked by disappointed expectation, secrecy, and a distance neither seems to have bridged while George was alive. George cast domestic life as the opposite of his imagined travels with his flock; after his death, Kate recognized how much of his recent life she had not understood and how rarely she had entered the world he made in the meadow.

Marriage and the promise of romance

George remembered Kate as the most beautiful woman in the village and, in the language of the love stories he read aloud to the sheep, his own Pamela. At first, he could hardly believe his luck. The marriage, however, did not preserve that romantic image. George complained in his readings that Kate had begun baking rich apple pies and had grown fat, while he remained thin and increasingly dry in manner. The sheep’s account makes clear that this is George’s resentful perspective, not a neutral portrait of Kate: it is his recurring way of turning dissatisfaction with married life into a story about red-haired women who ensnare men.

His fantasy of escape gave that complaint a larger shape. George dreamed of traveling across Europe with a flock of sheep, and the sheep understood Europe as a vast meadow full of apple trees. To him, the apple pie that accompanied married life could not substitute for that imagined journey. The contrast reveals a basic mismatch between the future he longed for and the domestic routine he experienced, though the evidence gives George’s grievances far more space than Kate’s view of their marriage.

The meadow and their separate worlds

George’s daily life with the flock was intimate and habitual. He came early, when the sheep were still huddled together in sleep, and Tess had to drive them apart before he urged them down to work. He laughed at their reluctance while tending his vegetable garden or making repairs. By afternoon, the sheep gathered by the steps of his caravan, where he read to them. His books ranged from fairy tales and a frightening book about sheep diseases to a detective story he abandoned halfway through. Mostly, he chose romance novels and used their plots to air his anger at Kate and at women like the heroines.

Kate’s later account shows that this meadow life remained largely outside their shared life. She said George had not let her come up to see him there, and she regretted not visiting or bringing him apple pie. She had taken over the wool after he brought it home, but admitted that she had never taken an interest in the animals themselves. The contrast is not simply between a shepherd and a wife: George built companionship with the flock in a place from which, by Kate’s account, he excluded her. Her late wish to have shared that place cannot undo the separation, but it makes its cost newly visible.

Secrecy and belated knowledge

When Kate came to the meadow after George’s death, she said she had not always had an easy time with him. She also wished she had known him better. In retrospect, his recent behavior had seemed strange: he drove out often, kept letters she was not allowed to open, and, as she discovered, secretly read romance novels. She had not known that the books George had read to the sheep were also part of a concealed private habit. The sheep, who had heard him perform and complain through those stories, knew a side of his life that Kate encountered only after his death.

That difference in knowledge complicates the marriage’s apparent roles. Kate had heard George’s complaints about domestic life only indirectly, while the sheep heard him repeatedly turn those complaints into readings. Meanwhile, his journeys and unopened letters left Kate without an explanation of what was occupying him. The evidence does not disclose what the letters contained or why he kept them from her; it establishes the secrecy and Kate’s belated awareness, not a definitive account of its cause.

Grief, regret, and the will

At the meadow, Kate described the place as beautiful and mourned that she had not come there while George was alive. She cried as she recalled her limited interest in the flock and her role in handling the wool. Her grief is therefore joined to an admission: she had participated in the household’s practical connection to the sheep without developing a relationship with them, and she now wished she had taken a more personal interest in George’s life on the pasture.

The question of George’s will made their separation material as well as emotional. Kate said he had left it with a lawyer in town and had searched for a long time to find the right lawyer. She did not want the estate and hoped he had not left anything to another woman. The identity of that woman and the terms of the will are not established in this conversation, so her remark remains an anxious suspicion rather than a disclosed fact. She also rejected an offer to approach Ham, saying that the matter between them was long over. Her response closes off one possible intervention without explaining the history behind it.

The flock as George’s legacy

The flock makes the difference between George and Kate especially clear. George treated its care as a daily responsibility and sought the culprit when a fierce dog took one of the lambs; after his own death, the sheep judged that someone had no right to kill their shepherd. Kate, by contrast, acknowledged that she had not cared about the animals. The distinction does not make her grief false: her regret rests precisely on recognizing how far she stood from a part of George’s life that mattered deeply to him.

That life continued to shape events after the marriage ended in death. Gabriel fenced his own sheep apart from George’s flock, and the pasture became smaller; his sheep were being fattened, while Gabriel eventually volunteered to take on the flock’s care under the arrangement discussed after the will was read. These later developments do not resolve what passed between George and Kate. They do show that the flock George imagined taking across Europe survived as a real responsibility, one that Kate’s grief could acknowledge but that she had never shared in the way he did.