I stared at her. She stared at me. “Yes, I am. I’m sixteen.”
She looked me over. “You’re at least twenty.” She cocked her head. “Aren’t you?”
We were silent. My heart pounded in my chest. “I turned sixteen in September,” I said.
“Oh.” Mother bit her lip, then she stood and smiled. “Well, don’t worry about it then. You can stay. Don’t know what your dad was thinking, really. I guess we forgot. Hard to keep track of how old you kids are.”
—
SHAWN RETURNED TO WORK, hobbling unsteadily. He wore an Aussie outback hat, which was large, wide-brimmed, and made of chocolate-brown oiled leather. Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was disrespectful. Disrespecting Dad might have been the reason Shawn wore it, but I suspect another reason was that it was large and comfortable and covered the scars from his surgery.
He worked short days at first. Dad had a contract to build a milking barn in Oneida County, about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak, so Shawn puttered around the yard, adjusting schematics and measuring I-beams.
Luke, Benjamin and I were scrapping. Dad had decided it was time to salvage the angle iron stacked all around the farm. To be sold, each piece had to measure less than four feet. Shawn suggested we use torches to cut the iron, but Dad said it would be too slow and cost too much in fuel.
A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. They bit down, their great jaws propelled by a heavy piston attached to a large iron wheel. The wheel was animated by a belt and motor, which meant that if something got caught in the machine, it would take anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute to stop the wheel and halt the blades. Up and down they roared, louder than a passing train as they chewed through iron as thick as a man’s arm. The iron wasn’t being cut so much as snapped. Sometimes it would buck, propelling whoever was holding it toward the dull, chomping blades.
Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off.
Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured.
Shawn lurched back to the shop, shaking his head. Dad began feeding iron through the Shear. Each length bucked him forward and twice he nearly pitched headfirst into the blades. I jammed my eyes shut, knowing that if Dad’s head got caught, the blades wouldn’t even slow, just hack through his neck and keep chomping.
Now that he was sure the machine worked, Dad motioned for Luke to take over, and Luke, ever eager to please, stepped forward. Five minutes later Luke’s arm was gashed to the bone and he was running toward the house, blood spurting.
Dad scanned his crew. He motioned to Benjamin, but Benjamin shook his head, saying he liked his fingers attached, thanks anyway. Dad looked longingly at the house, and I imagined him wondering how long it would take Mother to stop the bleeding. Then his eyes settled on me.
“Come here, Tara.”
I didn’t move.
“Get over here,” he said.
I stepped forward slowly, not blinking, watching the Shear as if it might attack. Luke’s blood was still on the blade. Dad picked up a six-foot length of angle iron and handed me the end. “Keep a good hold on it,” he said. “But if it bucks, let go.”
The blades chomped, growling as they snapped up and down—a warning, I thought, like a dog’s snarl, to get the hell away. But Dad’s mania for the machine had carried him beyond the reach of reason.
“It’s easy,” he said.
I prayed when I fed the first piece to the blades. Not to avoid injury—there was no possibility of that—but that the injury would be like Luke’s, a wedge of flesh, so I could go to the house, too. I chose smaller pieces, hoping my weight could control the lurch. Then I ran out of small pieces. I picked up the smallest of what was left, but the metal was still thick. I shoved it through and waited for the jaws to crash shut. The sound of solid iron fracturing was thunderous. The iron bucked, tossing me forward so both my feet left the ground. I let go and collapsed in the dirt, and the iron, now free, and being chewed violently by the blades, launched into the air then crashed down next to me.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” Shawn appeared in the corner of my vision. He strode over and pulled me to my feet, then spun around to face Dad.
“Five minutes ago, this monster nearly ripped Luke’s arm off! So you’ve put Tara on it?”
“She’s made of strong stuff,” Dad said, winking at me.
Shawn’s eyes bulged. He was supposed to be taking it easy, but he looked apoplectic.
“It’s going to take her head off!” he screamed. He turned to me and waved toward the ironworker in the shop. “Go make clips to fit those purlins. I don’t want you coming near this thing again.”
Dad moved forward. “This is my crew. You work for me and so does Tara. I told her to run the Shear, and she will run it.”
They shouted at each other for fifteen minutes. It was different from the fights they’d had before—this was unrestrained somehow, hateful. I’d never seen anyone yell at my father like that, and I was astonished by, then afraid of, the change it wrought in his features. His face transformed, becoming rigid, desperate. Shawn had awoken something in Dad, some primal need. Dad could not lose this argument and save face. If I didn’t run the Shear, Dad would no longer be Dad.
Shawn leapt forward and shoved Dad hard in the chest. Dad stumbled backward, tripped and fell. He lay in the mud, shocked, for a moment, then he climbed to his feet and lunged toward his son. Shawn raised his arms to block the punch, but when Dad saw this he lowered his fists, perhaps remembering that Shawn had only recently regained the ability to walk.
“I told her to do it, and she will do it,” Dad said, low and angry. “Or she won’t live under my roof.”
Shawn looked at me. For a moment, he seemed to consider helping me pack—after all, he had run away from Dad at my age—but I shook my head. I wasn’t leaving, not like that. I would work the Shear first, and Shawn knew it. He looked at the Shear, then at the pile next to it, about fifty thousand pounds of iron. “She’ll do it,” he said.
Dad seemed to grow five inches. Shawn bent unsteadily and lifted a piece of heavy iron, then heaved it toward the Shear.
“Don’t be stupid,” Dad said.
“If she’s doing it, I’m doing it,” Shawn said. The fight had left his voice. I’d never seen Shawn give way to Dad, not once, but he’d decided to lose this argument. He understood that if he didn’t submit, I surely would.
“You’re my foreman!” Dad shouted. “I need you in Oneida, not mucking with scrap!”
“Then shut down the Shear.”
Dad walked away cursing, exasperated, but probably thinking that Shawn would get tired and go back to being foreman before supper. Shawn watched Dad leave, then he turned to me and said, “Okay, Siddle Liss. You bring the pieces and I’ll feed them through. If the iron is thick, say a half inch, I’ll need your weight on the back to keep me from getting tossed into the blades. Okay?”
Shawn and I ran the Shear for a month. Dad was too stubborn to shut it down, even though it cost him more to have his foreman salvaging than it would have cost him to cut the iron with torches. When we finished, I had some bruises but I wasn’t hurt. Shawn seemed bled of life. It had only been a few months since his fall from the pallet, and his body couldn’t take the wear. He was cracked in the head many times when a length of iron bucked at an unexpected angle. When that happened he’d sit for a minute in the dirt, his hands over his eyes, then he’d stand and reach for the next length. In the evenings he lay on the kitchen floor in his stained shirt and dusty jeans, too weary even to shower.
I fetched all the food and water he asked for. Sadie came most evenings, and the two of us would run side by side when he sent us for ice, then to remove the ice, then to put the ice back in. We were both Fish Eyes.
The next morning Shawn and I would return to the Shear, and he would feed iron through its jaws, which chewed with such force that it pulled him off his feet, easily, playfully, as if it were a game, as if he were a child.
