My father was carried to the couch. Rescue Remedyāthe homeopathic for shockāwas poured into the lipless cavity that had been his mouth. They gave him lobelia and skullcap for the pain, the same mixture Mother had given Luke years before. Dad choked on the medicine. He couldnāt swallow. Heād inhaled the fiery blast, and his insides were charred.
Mother tried to take him to the hospital, but between rasping breaths he whispered that heād rather die than see a doctor. The authority of the man was such that she gave way.
The dead skin was gently cut away and he was slathered in salveāthe same salve Mother had used on Lukeās leg years beforeāfrom his waist to the tip of his head, then bandaged. Mother gave him ice cubes to suck on, hoping to hydrate him, but the inside of his mouth and throat were so badly burned, they absorbed no liquid, and without lips or muscles he couldnāt hold the ice in his mouth. It would slide down his throat and choke him.
They nearly lost him many times that first night. His breathing would slow, then stop, and my motherāand the heavenly host of women who worked for herāwould fly about, adjusting chakras and tapping pressure points, anything to coax his brittle lungs to resume their rattle.
That morning was when Audrey called me.* His heart had stopped twice during the night, she told me. It would probably be his heart that killed him, assuming his lungs didnāt give out first. Either way, Audrey was sure heād be dead by midday.
I called Nick. I told him I had to go to Idaho for a few days, for a family thing, nothing serious. He knew I wasnāt telling him somethingāI could hear the hurt in his voice that I wouldnāt confide in himābut I put him out of my mind the moment I hung up the phone.
I stood, keys in hand, hand on the doorknob, and hesitated. The strep. What if I gave it to Dad? I had been taking the penicillin for nearly three days. The doctor had said that after twenty-four hours I would no longer be contagious, but then he was a doctor, and I didnāt trust him.
I waited a day. I took several times the prescribed dose of penicillin, then called Mother and asked what I should do.
āYou should come home,ā she said, and her voice broke. āI donāt think the strep will matter tomorrow.ā
I donāt recall the scenery from the drive. My eyes barely registered the patchwork of corn and potato fields, or the dark hills covered in pine. Instead I saw my father, the way heād looked the last time Iād seen him, that twisted expression. I remembered the searing pitch of my voice as Iād screamed at him.
Like Kylie, I donāt remember what I saw when I first looked at my father. I know that when Mother had removed the gauze that morning, sheād found that his ears were so burned, the skin so glutinous, they had fused to the syrupy tissue behind them. When I walked through the back door, the first thing I saw was Mother grasping a butter knife, which she was using to pry my fatherās ears from his skull. I can still picture her gripping the knife, her eyes fixed, focused, but where my father should be, thereās an aperture in my memory.
The smell in the room was powerfulāof charred flesh, and of comfrey, mullein and plantain. I watched Mother and Audrey change his remaining bandages. They began with his hands. His fingers were slimy, coated in a pale ooze that was either melted skin or pus. His arms were not burned and neither were his shoulders or back, but a thick swath of gauze ran over his stomach and chest. When they removed it, I was pleased to see large patches of raw, angry skin. There were a few craters from where the flames must have concentrated in jets. They gave off a pungent smell, like meat gone to rot, and were filled with white pools.
But it was his face that visited my dreams that night. He still had a forehead and nose. The skin around his eyes and partway down his cheeks was pink and healthy. But below his nose, nothing was where it should be. Red, mangled, sagging, it looked like a plastic drama mask that had been held too close to a candle.
Dad hadnāt swallowed anythingāno food, no waterāfor nearly three days. Mother called a hospital in Utah and begged them to give her an IV. āI need to hydrate him,ā she said. āHeāll die if he doesnāt get water.ā
The doctor said he would send a chopper that very minute but Mother said no. āThen I canāt help you,ā the doctor said. āYouāre going to kill him, and I want no part of it.ā
Mother was beside herself. In a final, desperate act, she gave Dad an enema, pushing the tube in as far as she dared, trying to flush enough liquid through his rectum to keep him alive. She had no idea if it would workāif there was even an organ in that part of the body to absorb the waterābut it was the only orifice that hadnāt been scorched.
I slept on the living room floor that night so I could be there, in the room, when we lost him. I awoke several times to gasps and flights of movements and murmurs that it had happened again, heād stopped breathing.
Once, an hour before dawn, his breath left him and I was sure it was the end: he was dead and would not be raised. I rested my hand on a small patch of bandages while Audrey and Mother rushed around me, chanting and tapping. The room was not at peace, or maybe itās just that I wasnāt. For years my father and I had been locked in conflict, an endless battle of wills. I thought I had accepted it, accepted our relationship for what it was. But in that moment, I realized how much Iād been counting on that conflict coming to an end, how deeply I believed in a future in which we would be a father and daughter at peace.
I watched his chest, prayed for him to breathe, but he didnāt. Then too much time had passed. I was preparing to move away, to let my mother and sister say goodbye, when he coughedāa brittle, rasping hack that sounded like crepe paper being crinkled. Then, like Lazarus reanimated, his chest began to rise and fall.
I told Mother I was leaving. Dad might survive, I said. And if he does, strep canāt be what kills him.
ā
MOTHERāS BUSINESS CAME TO a halt. The women who worked for her stopped concocting tinctures and bottling oils and instead made vats of salveāa new recipe, of comfrey, lobelia and plantain, that Mother had concocted specifically for my father. Mother smeared the salve over Dadās upper body twice a day. I donāt remember what other treatments they used, and I donāt know enough about the energy work to give an account. I know they went through seventeen gallons of salve in the first two weeks, and that Mother was ordering gauze in bulk.
Tyler flew in from Purdue. He took over for Mother, changing the bandages on Dadās fingers every morning, scraping away the layers of skin and muscle that had necrotized during the night. It didnāt hurt. The nerves were dead. āI scraped off so many layers,ā Tyler told me, āI was sure that one morning Iād hit bone.ā
Dadās fingers began to bow, bending unnaturally backward at the joint. This was because the tendons had begun to shrivel and contract. Tyler tried to curl Dadās fingers, to elongate the tendons and prevent the deformity from becoming permanent, but Dad couldnāt bear the pain.
I came back to Buckās Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dadās bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lordās pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it.
While I was away, I had scoured every video store within a hundred miles until Iād found the complete box set of The Honeymooners. I held it up for Dad. He blinked to show me heād seen it. I asked if he wanted to watch an episode. He blinked again. I pushed the first tape into the VCR and sat beside him, searching his warped face, listening to his soft whimpers, while on the screen Alice Kramden outfoxed her husband again and again.
* It is possible that my timeline is off here by one or two days. According to some who were there, although my father was horribly burned, he did not seem in any real danger until the third day, when the scabbing began, making it difficult to breathe. Dehydration compounded the situation. In this account, it was then that they feared for his life, and that is when my sister called me, only I misunderstood and assumed that the explosion had happened the day before.
Dad didnāt leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers was carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even after it became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of life it would be. All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though everything we did was just another form of waitingāwaiting to feed him, waiting to change his bandages. Waiting to see how much of our father would grow back.
It was difficult to imagine a man like Dadāproud, strong, physicalāpermanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother were forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he wasnāt able to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost.
But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been a hard manāa man who knew the truth on every subject and wasnāt interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence.
The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking was difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his throat was burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour, day after day, his eyes alert, his mouth shut.
Within a few weeks, my fatherāwho years earlier had not been able to guess my age within half a decadeāknew about my classes, my boyfriend, my summer job. I hadnāt told him any of it, but heād listened to the chatter between me and Audrey as we changed his bandages, and heād remembered.
āIād like to hear more about them classes,ā he rasped one morning near the end of the summer. āIt sounds real interesting.ā
It felt like a new beginning.
ā
DAD WAS STILL BEDRIDDEN when Shawn and Emily announced their engagement. It was suppertime, and the family was gathered around the kitchen table, when Shawn said he guessed heād marry Emily after all. There was silence while forks scraped plates. Mother asked if he was serious. He said he wasnāt, that he figured heād find somebody better before he actually had to go through with it. Emily sat next to him, wearing a warped smile.
I didnāt sleep that night. I kept checking the bolt on the door. The present seemed vulnerable to the past, as if it might be overwhelmed by it, as if I might blink, and when my eyes opened I would be fifteen.
The next morning Shawn said he and Emily were planning a twenty-mile horse ride to Bloomington Lake. I surprised both of us by saying I wanted to go. I felt anxious when I imagined all those hours in the wilderness with Shawn, but I pushed the anxiety aside. There was something I had to do.
Fifty miles feels like five hundred on a horse, particularly if your body is more accustomed to a chair than a saddle. When we arrived at the lake, Shawn and Emily slipped nimbly off their horses and began to make camp; it was all I could do to unhitch Apolloās saddle and ease myself onto a fallen tree. I watched Emily set up the tent we were to share. She was tall and unthinkably slight, with long, straight hair so blond it was nearly silver.
We built a fire and sang campfire songs. We played cards. Then we went to our tents. I lay awake in the dark next to Emily, listening to the crickets. I was trying to imagine how to begin the conversationāhow to tell her she shouldnāt marry my brotherāwhen she spoke. āI want to talk to you about Shawn,ā she said. āI know heās got some problems.ā
āHe does,ā I said.
āHeās a spiritual man,ā Emily said. āGod has given him a special calling. To help people. He told me how he helped Sadie. And how he helped you.ā
āHe didnāt help me.ā I wanted to say more, to explain to Emily what the bishop had explained to me. But they were his words, not mine. I had no words. I had come fifty miles to speak, and was mute.
āThe devil tempts him more than other men,ā Emily said. āBecause of his gifts, because heās a threat to Satan. Thatās why he has problems. Because of his righteousness.ā
She sat up. I could see the outline of her long ponytail in the dark. āHe said heāll hurt me,ā she said. āI know itās because of Satan. But sometimes Iām scared of him, Iām scared of what heāll do.ā
I told her she shouldnāt marry someone who scares her, that no one should, but the words left my lips stillborn. I believed them, but I didnāt understand them well enough to make them live.
I stared into the darkness, searching it for her face, trying to understand what power my brother had over her. Heād had that power over me, I knew. He had some of it still. I was neither under his spell, nor free of it.
āHeās a spiritual man,ā she said again. Then she slipped into her sleeping bag, and I knew the conversation was over.
ā