Educated(23)

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 who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.



* * *



—

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: I’d learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s 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 didn’t 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 now—the 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 father’s 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. I’d 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 couldn’t operate the loader—a 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. “We’ll get more in if you settle the iron after it’s been dumped. Hop in.”

I didn’t understand. He wanted to dump the bin with me in it? “I’ll climb up after you’ve dumped the load,” I said.

“No, this’ll be faster,” Dad said. “I’ll pause when the bin’s 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.”

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 trailer’s 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. “I’m stuck!” I shouted, only the growl of the loader’s engine was too loud. I wondered if Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely on the semi’s cab, but even as I wondered I knew he wouldn’t. 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 bin’s 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 I’d 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 wasn’t plunging downward. My palm caught hold of the bin’s 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 hoped—I prayed—that 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 trailer’s 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 Dad’s heavy step.

“What happened?” he said, kneeling next to me.

“I fell out,” I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and there was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if I’d been cut in two.

“How’d you manage that?” Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought. It’s a simple thing.