``You don't know what you're going to find up there,'' the father told his son. Richard Temple Jr. nodded and climbed onto his all-terrain vehicle (ATV). His father had gone to a window the night before, when the sky turned orange and the earth shook and a fireball rose up, and the father at first feared a nuclear attack.

Dec. 21, 1988. The son was in a pub in Lockerbie, and the road that took him home carried him by the pasture where the nose of Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into the earth. It took him a long time to get back to the family farm called Wylieholl, and in the morning, the son got up to go and do his job because the cattle and the sheep must be tended.

That is how the Temples, father and son, first came to know about ``the folk'' in the fields.
The son made the trip once again two weeks ago, his ATV climbing steep and rutted paths into hills where all you heard was the lowing of his cattle. The son loves to read, but he speaks only when it matters. He made the decision as a teenager to someday run the farm, and now his father's health is poor and young Richard tends the place.

A livestock farmer in Scotland has plenty of trouble. The scare over mad cow disease has wounded the cattle industry, and the price of wool also is plummeting. A young man with no brains or creativity would stand little chance. ``You diversify,'' said the son, 32, who plows roads in the winter and builds prefab barns in his spare time.

Objects that fell
Constant work helps him move past what he saw on the hill 10 years ago. ``He doesn't talk about it,'' said Richard Sr., 72, who had an inkling of what his son might find.
The ATV kept climbing, past the place where a scorched luggage carrier slammed into the earth. ``What I remember is a pair of hiking boots,'' the father said.

His son didn't comment on that as he rode up the hill. He gunned the ATV until it climbed a good 2 miles in the fields, to a point high above the pastures and the town, a place where all you saw were green hills, stone walls and sheep. Then Richard Jr. climbed off and stood alone. Waving his arm, he said, ``What you have to imagine is that the cattle stampeded, and they all went over there.''

He spoke with pity of the terror of his livestock, of fire in the sky and objects plummeting.
Objects that fell, said the son, in a long path, a straight line of debris for as far as he could see, and in that swath upon his land were what he called ``the folk.'' That morning, seeing them, he half- believed they were asleep.
``Seven or eight,'' he said. ``Over there, right there, were two wee little bairns. Right together, they were,'' and then he was silent. He finally said, ``It makes you think that they were holding each other for dear life.''
He stopped again, and you could hear only the cattle. ``Aye, a hell of a thing to think of,'' said Richard Jr., and it came to him often as he worked the fields. ``One minute you're up there, and the next you're sky diving.''

`The folk' in the field
All 259 aboard the plane were killed. The memory of the children in his field haunts young Richard. It took two days for investigators to remove the bodies. Each morning, Richard's mother, June, bundled up and walked to the hills, and then she knelt by each of ``the folk' ' in the fields and said a prayer while her son did his work.
Richard Jr. walked over to a stone outcropping, a nook at the top of the hill. Yes, he said, they found a woman there, and the son' s Scottish accent was soft music as he spoke of her, the way she seemed to be in such absolute peace. On a quiet day long after the crash, he discovered that someone had painted a neat message on the stone: ``JFK - Dec. 21, 1988.''

The initials are those of Julianne Frances Kelly. She was a junior, a political science and communications major, at Syracuse University in New York. The Temples have never had contact with her family. At first, said Richard Jr., he was troubled by the shrine. He went past it every day. It wouldn't let him forget.
But he found himself tidying up the loose rocks when his livestock jarred the place, and the shrine is now a quiet part of caring for his flock.

Julianne Kelly's sister, Janice, lives in Massachusetts. When reached by telephone, she said her family didn't know about the painted letters. It is a comfort, she said, to learn that someone tends the place.
``I have this dream,'' Janice said. ``Someday I want to go there and lie down and look up at the sky.''

Sean Kirst, Dec. 21, 1988 // Lockerbie remembers when then night turned orange 10 years ago., Minneapolis Star Tribune, 12-22-1998, pp 06A.