But I didnāt ask. There was something in the hard line of my fatherās face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all heād sacrificed to raise me.
I made some effort to keep up my schooling in the free time I had between scrapping and helping Mother make tinctures and blend oils. Mother had given up homeschooling by then, but still had a computer, and there were books in the basement. I found the science book, with its colorful illustrations, and the math book I remembered from years before. I even located a faded green book of history. But when I sat down to study I nearly always fell asleep. The pages were glossy and soft, made softer by the hours Iād spent hauling scrap.
When Dad saw me with one of those books, heād try to get me away from them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if he could just distract me for a few years, the danger would pass. So he made up jobs for me to do, whether they needed doing or not. One afternoon, after heād caught me looking at the math book, he and I spent an hour hauling buckets of water across the field to his fruit trees, which wouldnāt have been at all unusual except it was during a rainstorm.
But if Dad was trying to keep his children from being overly interested in school and booksāfrom being seduced by the Illuminati, like Tyler had beenāhe would have done better to turn his attention to Richard. Richard was also supposed to spend his afternoons making tinctures for Mother, but he almost never did. Instead, heād disappear. I donāt know if Mother knew where he went, but I did. In the afternoons, Richard could nearly always be found in the dark basement, wedged in the crawl space between the couch and the wall, an encyclopedia propped open in front of him. If Dad happened by heād turn the light off, muttering about wasted electricity. Then Iād find some excuse to go downstairs so I could turn it back on. If Dad came through again, a snarl would sound through the house, and Mother would have to sit through a lecture on leaving lights on in empty rooms. She never scolded me, which makes me wonder if she did know where Richard was. If I couldnāt get back down to turn on the light, Richard would pull the book to his nose and read in the dark; he wanted to read that badly. He wanted to read the encyclopedia that badly.
ā
TYLER WAS GONE. There was hardly a trace heād ever lived in the house, except one: every night, after dinner, I would close the door to my room and pull Tylerās old boom box from under my bed. Iād dragged his desk into my room, and while the choir sang I would settle into his chair and study, just as Iād seen him do on a thousand nights. I didnāt study history or math. I studied religion.
I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only. I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dadās books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth centuryāstiff, winding, but exactāand at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my peopleās history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.
In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother whoād deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
ā
BY THE TIME THE SNOW on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: Iād learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dadās lips whenever he tossed something heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud, I didnāt salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill.
The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music, drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the sounds that played in my head at night nowāthe jingle of corrugated tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron.
I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my fatherās eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them, watching us scrap, stepping forward and catching the car batteries or jagged lengths of steel tubing that Dad launched across the yard. Iād stopped shouting at Dad for throwing them. Instead, I prayed.
I worked faster when I salvaged alone, so one morning when Dad was in the northern tip of the yard, near the mountain, I headed for the southern tip, near the pasture. I filled a bin with two thousand pounds of iron; then, my arms aching, I ran to find Dad. The bin had to be emptied, and I couldnāt operate the loaderāa massive forklift with a telescopic arm and wide, black wheels that were taller than I was. The loader would raise the bin some twenty-five feet into the air and then, with the boom extended, tilt the forks so the scrap could slide out, raining down into the trailer with a tremendous clamor. The trailer was a fifty-foot flatbed rigged for scrapping, essentially a giant bucket. Its walls were made of thick iron sheets that reached eight feet from the bed. The trailer could hold between fifteen and twenty bins, or about forty thousand pounds of iron.
I found Dad in the field, lighting a fire to burn the insulation from a tangle of copper wires. I told him the bin was ready, and he walked back with me and climbed into the loader. He waved at the trailer. āWeāll get more in if you settle the iron after itās been dumped. Hop in.ā
I didnāt understand. He wanted to dump the bin with me in it? āIāll climb up after youāve dumped the load,ā I said.
āNo, thisāll be faster,ā Dad said. āIāll pause when the binās level with the trailer wall so you can climb out. Then you can run along the wall and perch on top of the cab until the dump is finished.ā
I settled myself on a length of iron. Dad jammed the forks under the bin, then lifted me and the scrap and began driving, full throttle, toward the trailerās head. I could barely hold on. On the last turn, the bucket swung with such force that a spike of iron was flung toward me. It pierced the inside of my leg, an inch below my knee, sliding into the tissue like a knife into warm butter. I tried to pull it out but the load had shifted, and it was partially buried. I heard the soft groaning of hydraulic pumps as the boom extended. The groaning stopped when the bin was level with the trailer. Dad was giving me time to climb onto the trailer wall but I was pinned. āIām stuck!ā I shouted, only the growl of the loaderās engine was too loud. I wondered if Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely on the semiās cab, but even as I wondered I knew he wouldnāt. Time was still stalking.
The hydraulics groaned and the bin raised another eight feet. Dumping position. I shouted again, higher this time, then lower, trying to find a pitch that would pierce through the drone of the engine. The bin began its tilt, slowly at first, then quickly. I was pinned near the back. I wrapped my hands around the binās top wall, knowing this would give me a ledge to grasp when the bin was vertical. As the bin continued to pitch, the scrap at the front began to slide forward, bit by bit, a great iron glacier breaking apart. The spike was still embedded in my leg, dragging me downward. My grip had slipped and Iād begun to slide when the spike finally ripped from me and fell away, smashing into the trailer with a tremendous crash. I was now free, but falling. I flailed my arms, willing them to seize something that wasnāt plunging downward. My palm caught hold of the binās side wall, which was now nearly vertical. I pulled myself toward it and hoisted my body over its edge, then continued my fall. Because I was now falling from the side of the bin and not the front, I hopedāI prayedāthat I was falling toward the ground and not toward the trailer, which was at that moment a fury of grinding metal. I sank, seeing only blue sky, waiting to feel either the stab of sharp iron or the jolt of solid earth.
My back struck iron: the trailerās wall. My feet snapped over my head and I continued my graceless plunge to the ground. The first fall was seven or eight feet, the second perhaps ten. I was relieved to taste dirt.
I lay on my back for perhaps fifteen seconds before the engine growled to silence and I heard Dadās heavy step.
āWhat happened?ā he said, kneeling next to me.
āI fell out,ā I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and there was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if Iād been cut in two.
āHowād you manage that?ā Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought. Itās a simple thing.
Dad examined the gash in my leg, which had been ripped wide as the spike had fallen away. It looked like a pothole; the tissue had simply sunk out of sight. Dad slipped out of his flannel shirt and pressed it to my leg. āGo on home,ā he said. āMother will stop the bleeding.ā
I limped through the pasture until Dad was out of sight, then collapsed in the tall wheatgrass. I was shaking, gulping mouthfuls of air that never made it to my lungs. I didnāt understand why I was crying. I was alive. I would be fine. The angels had done their part. So why couldnāt I stop trembling?
I was light-headed when I crossed the last field and approached the house, but I burst through the back door, as Iād seen my brothers do, as Robert and Emma had done, shouting for Mother. When she saw the crimson footprints streaked across the linoleum, she fetched the homeopathic she used to treat hemorrhages and shock, called Rescue Remedy, and put twelve drops of the clear, tasteless liquid under my tongue. She rested her left hand lightly on the gash and crossed the fingers of her right. Her eyes closed. Click click click. āThereās no tetanus,ā she said. āThe wound will close. Eventually. But itāll leave a nasty scar.ā
She turned me onto my stomach and examined the bruiseāa patch of deep purple the size of a human headāthat had formed a few inches above my hip. Again her fingers crossed and her eyes closed. Click click click.
āYouāve damaged your kidney,ā she said. āWeād better make a fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.ā
ā
THE GASH BELOW MY knee had formed a scabādark and shiny, a black river flowing through pink fleshāwhen I came to a decision.
I chose a Sunday evening, when Dad was resting on the couch, his Bible propped open in his lap. I stood in front of him for what felt like hours, but he didnāt look up, so I blurted out what Iād come to say: āI want to go to school.ā
He seemed not to have heard me.
āIāve prayed, and I want to go,ā I said.
Finally, Dad looked up and straight ahead, his gaze fixed on something behind me. The silence settled, its presence heavy. āIn this family,ā he said, āwe obey the commandments of the Lord.ā
He picked up his Bible and his eyes twitched as they jumped from line to line. I turned to leave, but before I reached the doorway Dad spoke again. āYou remember Jacob and Esau?ā
āI remember,ā I said.
He returned to his reading, and I left quietly. I did not need any explanation; I knew what the story meant. It meant that I was not the daughter he had raised, the daughter of faith. I had tried to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.
It was a rainless summer. The sun blazed across the sky each afternoon, scorching the mountain with its arid, desiccating heat, so that each morning when I crossed the field to the barn, I felt stalks of wild wheat crackle and break beneath my feet.
I spent an amber morning making the Rescue Remedy homeopathic for Mother. I would take fifteen drops from the base formulaāwhich was kept in Motherās sewing cupboard, where it would not be used or pollutedāand add them to a small bottle of distilled water. Then I would make a circle with my index finger and my thumb, and push the bottle through the circle. The strength of the homeopathic, Mother said, depended on how many passes the bottle made through my fingers, how many times it drew on my energy. Usually I stopped at fifty.
Dad and Luke were on the mountain, in the junkyard above the upper pasture, a quarter mile from the house. They were preparing cars for the crusher, which Dad had hired for later that week. Luke was seventeen. He had a lean, muscular build and, when outdoors, an easy smile. Luke and Dad were draining gasoline from the tanks. The crusher wonāt take a car with the fuel tank attached, because thereās a risk of explosion, so every tank had to be drained and removed. It was slow work, puncturing the tank with a hammer and stake, then waiting for the fuel to drip out so the tank could be safely removed with a cutting torch. Dad had devised a shortcut: an enormous skewer, eight feet tall, of thick iron. Dad would lift a car with the forklift, and Luke would guide him until the carās tank was suspended directly over the spike. Then Dad would drop the forks. If all went well, the car would be impaled on the spike and gasoline would gush from the tank, streaming down the spike and into the flat-bottom container Dad had welded in place to collect it.
By noon, they had drained somewhere between thirty and forty cars. Luke had collected the fuel in five-gallon buckets, which he began to haul across the yard to Dadās flatbed. On one pass he stumbled, drenching his jeans in a gallon of gas. The summer sun dried the denim in a matter of minutes. He finished hauling the buckets, then went home for lunch.
I remember that lunch with unsettling clarity. I remember the clammy smell of beef-and-potato casserole, and the jingle of ice cubes tumbling into tall glasses, which sweated in the summer heat. I remember Mother telling me I was on dish duty, because she was leaving for Utah after lunch to consult for another midwife on a complicated pregnancy. She said she might not make it home for dinner but there was hamburger in the freezer.
I remember laughing the whole hour. Dad lay on the kitchen floor cracking jokes about an ordinance that had recently passed in our little farming village. A stray dog had bitten a boy and everyone was up in arms. The mayor had decided to limit dog ownership to two dogs per family, even though the attacking dog hadnāt belonged to anybody at all.
āThese genius socialists,ā Dad said. āTheyād drown staring up at the rain if you didnāt build a roof over them.ā I laughed so hard at that my stomach ached.
Luke had forgotten all about the gasoline by the time he and Dad walked back up the mountain and readied the cutting torch, but when he jammed the torch into his hip and struck flint to steel, flames burst from the tiny spark and engulfed his leg.
The part we would remember, would tell and retell so many times it became family folklore, was that Luke was unable to get out of his gasoline-soaked jeans. That morning, like every morning, he had hitched up his trousers with a yard of baling twine, which is smooth and slippery, and needs a horsemanās knot to stay in place. His footwear didnāt help, either: bulbous steel-toed boots so tattered that for weeks heād been duct-taping them on each morning, then cutting them off each night with his pocketknife. Luke might have severed the twine and hacked through the boots in a matter of seconds, but he went mad with panic and took off, dashing like a marked buck, spreading fire through the sagebrush and wheat grass, which were baked and brittle from the parched summer.
ā
IāD STACKED THE DIRTY dishes and was filling the kitchen sink when I heard itāa shrill, strangled cry that began in one key and ended in another. There was no question it was human. Iād never heard an animal bellow like that, with such fluctuations in tone and pitch.
I ran outside and saw Luke hobbling across the grass. He screamed for Mother, then collapsed. Thatās when I saw that the jeans on his left leg were gone, melted away. Parts of the leg were livid, red and bloody; others were bleached and dead. Papery ropes of skin wrapped delicately around his thigh and down his calf, like wax dripping from a cheap candle.