Educated (17 page)

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.

Construction began on the milking barn in Oneida. Shawn designed and welded the main frame—the massive beams that formed the skeleton of the building. They were too heavy for the loader; only a crane could lift them. It was a delicate procedure, requiring the welders to balance on opposite ends of a beam while it was lowered onto columns, then welded in place. Shawn surprised everyone when he announced that he wanted me to operate the crane.

“Tara can’t drive the crane,” Dad said. “It’ll take half the morning to teach her the controls, and she still won’t know what the hell she’s doing.”

“But she’ll be careful,” Shawn said, “and I’m done falling off shit.”

An hour later I was in the man box, and Shawn and Luke were standing on either end of a beam, twenty feet in the air. I brushed the lever lightly, listening as the hydraulic cylinders hissed softly to protract. “Hold!” Shawn shouted when the beam was in place, then they nodded their helmets down and began to weld.

My operating the crane was one of a hundred disputes between Dad and Shawn that Shawn won that summer. Most were not resolved so peacefully. They argued nearly every day—about a flaw in the schematics or a tool that had been left at home. Dad seemed eager to fight, to prove who was in charge.

One afternoon Dad walked over and stood right next to Shawn, watching him weld. A minute later, for no reason, he started shouting: that Shawn had taken too long at lunch, that he wasn’t getting the crew up early enough or working us hard enough. Dad yelled for several minutes, then Shawn took off his welding helmet, looked at him calmly and said, “You gonna shut up so I can work?”

Dad kept yelling. He said Shawn was lazy, that he didn’t know how to run a crew, didn’t understand the value of hard work. Shawn stepped down from his welding and ambled over to the flatbed pickup. Dad followed, still hollering. Shawn pulled off his gloves, slowly, delicately, one finger at a time, as if there weren’t a man screaming six inches from his face. For several moments he stood still, letting the abuse wash over him, then he stepped into the pickup and drove off, leaving Dad to shout at the dust.

I remember the awe I felt as I watched that pickup roll down the dirt road. Shawn was the only person I had ever seen stand up to Dad, the only one whose force of mind, whose sheer tonnage of conviction, could make Dad give way. I had seen Dad lose his temper and shout at every one of my brothers. Shawn was the only one I ever saw walk away.

—

IT WAS A SATURDAY NIGHT. I was at Grandma-over-in-town’s, my math book propped open on the kitchen table, a plate of cookies next to me. I was studying to retake the ACT. I often studied at Grandma’s so Dad wouldn’t lecture me.

The phone rang. It was Shawn. Did I want to watch a movie? I said I did, and a few minutes later I heard a loud rumble and looked out the window. With his booming black motorcycle and his wide-brimmed Aussie hat, he seemed entirely out of place parking parallel to Grandma’s white picket fence. Grandma started making brownies, and Shawn and I went upstairs to choose a movie.

We paused the movie when Grandma delivered the brownies. We ate them in silence, our spoons clicking loudly against Grandma’s porcelain plates. “You’ll get your twenty-seven,” Shawn said suddenly when we’d finished.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll go either way. What if Dad’s right? What if I get brainwashed?”

Shawn shrugged. “You’re as smart as Dad. If Dad’s right, you’ll know when you get there.”

The movie ended. We told Grandma good night. It was a balmy summer evening, perfect for the motorcycle, and Shawn said I should ride home with him, we’d get the car tomorrow. He revved the engine, waiting for me to climb on. I took a step toward him, then remembered the math book on Grandma’s table.

“You go,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Shawn yanked his hat down on his head, spun the bike around and charged down the empty street.

I drove in a happy stupor. The night was black—that thick darkness that belongs only in backcountry, where the houses are few and the streetlights fewer, where starlight goes unchallenged. I navigated the winding highway as I’d done numberless times before, racing down the Bear River Hill, coasting through the flat stretch parallel to Fivemile Creek. Up ahead the road climbed and bent to the right. I knew the curve was there without looking for it, and wondered at the still headlights I saw shining in the blackness.

I began the ascent. There was a pasture to my left, a ditch to my right. As the incline began in earnest I saw three cars pulled off near the ditch. The doors were open, the cab lights on. Seven or eight people huddled around something on the gravel. I changed lanes to drive around them, but stopped when I saw a small object lying in the middle of the highway.

It was a wide-brimmed Aussie hat.

I pulled over and ran toward the people clustered by the ditch. “Shawn!” I shouted.

The crowd parted to let me through. Shawn was facedown on the gravel, lying in a pool of blood that looked pink in the glare from the headlights. He wasn’t moving. “He hit a cow coming around the corner,” a man said. “It’s so dark tonight, he didn’t even see it. We’ve called an ambulance. We don’t dare move him.”

Shawn’s body was contorted, his back twisted. I had no idea how long an ambulance might take, and there was so much blood. I decided to stop the bleeding. I dug my hands under his shoulder and heaved but I couldn’t lift him. I looked up at the crowd and recognized a face. Dwain.
^*
He was one of
us
. Mother had midwifed four of his eight children.

“Dwain! Help me turn him.”

Dwain hefted Shawn onto his back. For a second that contained an hour, I stared at my brother, watching the blood trickle out of his temple and down his right cheek, pouring over his ear and onto his white T-shirt. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. The blood was oozing from a hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead. It looked as though his temple had been dragged on the asphalt, scraping away skin, then bone. I leaned close and peered inside the wound. Something soft and spongy glistened back at me. I slipped out of my jacket and pressed it to Shawn’s head.

When I touched the abrasion, Shawn released a long sigh and his eyes opened.

“Sidlister,” he mumbled. Then he seemed to lose consciousness.

My cellphone was in my pocket. I dialed. Dad answered.

I must have been frantic, sputtering. I said Shawn had crashed his bike, that he had a hole in his head.

“Slow down. What happened?”

I said it all a second time. “What should I do?”

“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother will deal with it.”

I opened my mouth but no words came out. Finally, I said, “I’m not joking. His brain, I can see it!”

“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother can handle it.” Then: the dull drone of a dial tone. He’d hung up.

Dwain had overheard. “I live just through this field,” he said. “Your mother can treat him there.”

“No,” I said. “Dad wants him home. Help me get him in the car.”

Shawn groaned when we lifted him but he didn’t speak again. Someone said we should wait for the ambulance. Someone else said we should drive him to the hospital ourselves. I don’t think anyone believed we would take him home, not with his brain dribbling out of his forehead.

We folded Shawn into the backseat. I got behind the wheel, and Dwain climbed in on the passenger side. I checked my rearview mirror to pull onto the highway, then reached up and shoved the mirror downward so it reflected Shawn’s face, blank and bloodied. My foot hovered over the gas.

Three seconds passed, maybe four. That’s all it was.

Dwain was shouting, “Let’s go!” but I barely heard him. I was lost to panic. My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that, five minutes before, I had needed to believe.

I had never thought about the day Shawn had fallen from the pallet. There was nothing to think about. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall; there was no deeper meaning in it than that. I had never imagined what it would have been like to be there. To see Shawn plunge, grasping at air. To watch him collide, then fold, then lie still. I had never allowed myself to imagine what happened
after
—Dad’s decision to leave him by the pickup, or the worried looks that must have passed between Luke and Benjamin.

Now, staring at the creases in my brother’s face, each a little river of blood, I remembered. I remembered that Shawn had sat by the pickup for a quarter of an hour, his brain bleeding. Then he’d had that fit and the boys had wrestled him to the ground, so that he’d fallen, sustained a second injury, the injury the doctors said should have killed him. It was the reason Shawn would never quite be Shawn again.

If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?

—

I’D NEVER BEEN TO the hospital in town, but it was easy to find.

Dwain had asked me what the hell I was doing when I flipped a U-turn and accelerated down the hillside. I’d listened to Shawn’s shallow breathing as I raced through the valley, along Fivemile Creek, then shot up the Bear River Hill. At the hospital, I parked in the emergency lane, and Dwain and I carried Shawn through the glass doors. I shouted for help. A nurse appeared, running, then another. Shawn was conscious by then. They took him away and someone shoved me into the waiting room.

There was no avoiding what had to be done next. I called Dad.

“You nearly home?” he said.

“I’m at the hospital.”

There was silence, then he said, “We’re coming.”

Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa, Mother pacing and clicking her fingers, and Dad sitting motionless beneath a loud wall clock.

The doctor gave Shawn a CAT scan. He said the wound was nasty but the damage was minimal, and then I remembered what the last doctors had told me—that with head injuries, often the ones that look the worst are actually less severe—and I felt stupid for panicking and bringing him here. The hole in the bone was small, the doctor said. It might grow over on its own, or a surgeon could put in a metal plate. Shawn said he’d like to see how it healed, so the doctor folded the skin over the hole and stitched it.

We took Shawn home around three in the morning. Dad drove, with Mother next to him, and I rode in the backseat with Shawn. No one spoke. Dad didn’t yell or lecture; in fact, he never mentioned that night again. But there was something in the way he fixed his gaze, never looking directly at me, that made me think a fork had come along in the road, and I’d gone one way and he the other. After that night, there was never any question of whether I would go or stay. It was as if we were living in the future, and I was already gone.

When I think of that night now, I don’t think of the dark highway, or of my brother lying in a pool of his own blood. I think of the waiting room, with its ice-blue sofa and pale walls. I smell its sterilized air. I hear the ticking of a plastic clock.

Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I’ve never understood it before. The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done.

I am not sorry, merely ashamed.

—

THE ENVELOPE ARRIVED THREE weeks later, just as Shawn was getting back on his feet. I tore it open, feeling numb, as if I were reading my sentence after the guilty verdict had already been handed down. I scanned down to the composite score. Twenty-eight. I checked it again. I checked my name. There was no mistake. Somehow—and a miracle was the only way I could account for it—I’d done it.

My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for my father. I drove to the only grocery store in town, called Stokes, and applied for a job bagging groceries. I was only sixteen, but I didn’t tell the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift started at four o’clock the next morning.

When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard. I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail. Over the roar of the engine, I told him I’d found a job but that I would drive the crane in the afternoons, until he could hire someone. He dropped the boom and stared ahead.

“You’ve already decided,” he said without glancing at me. “No point dragging it out.”

I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I’d been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made sure I met all the requirements to graduate.

My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying, for trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn’t to school. Home had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me.