Educated(45)

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THE STORY OF HOW Shawn fell would come to me in bits and pieces, thin lines of narrative from Luke and Benjamin, who were there. It was a frigid afternoon and the wind was fierce, whipping the fine dust up in soft clouds. Shawn was standing on a wooden pallet, twenty feet in the air. Twelve feet below him was a half-finished concrete wall, with rebar jutting outward like blunt skewers. I don’t know for certain what Shawn was doing on the pallet, but he was probably fitting posts or welding, because that was the kind of work he did. Dad was driving the forklift.

I’ve heard conflicting accounts of why Shawn fell.* Someone said Dad moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge. But the general consensus is that Shawn was standing near the brink, and for no reason at all stepped backward and lost his footing. He plunged twelve feet, his body revolving slowly in the air, so that when he struck the concrete wall with its outcropping of rebar, he hit headfirst, then tumbled the last eight feet to the dirt.

This is how the fall was described to me, but my mind sketches it differently—on a white page with evenly spaced lines. He ascends, falls at a slope, strikes the rebar and returns to the ground. I perceive a triangle. The event makes sense when I think of it in these terms. Then the logic of the page yields to my father.

Dad looked Shawn over. Shawn was disoriented. One of his pupils was dilated and the other wasn’t, but no one knew what that meant. No one knew it meant there was a bleed inside his brain.

Dad told Shawn to take a break. Luke and Benjamin helped him prop himself against the pickup, then went back to work.

The facts after this point are even more hazy.

The story I heard was that fifteen minutes later Shawn wandered onto the site. Dad thought he was ready to work and told him to climb onto the pallet, and Shawn, who never liked being told what to do, started screaming at Dad about everything—the equipment, the granary designs, his pay. He screamed himself hoarse, then just when Dad thought he had calmed down, he gripped Dad around the waist and flung him like a sack of grain. Before Dad could scramble to his feet Shawn took off, leaping and howling and laughing, and Luke and Benjamin, now sure something was very wrong, chased after him. Luke reached him first but couldn’t hold him; then Benjamin added his weight and Shawn slowed a little. But it wasn’t until all three men tackled him—throwing his body to the ground, where, because he was resisting, his head hit hard—that he finally lay still.

No one has ever described to me what happened when Shawn’s head struck that second time. Whether he had a seizure, or vomited, or lost consciousness, I’m not sure. But it was so chilling that someone—maybe Dad, probably Benjamin—dialed 911, which no member of my family had ever done before.

They were told a helicopter would arrive in minutes. Later the doctors would speculate that when Dad, Luke and Benjamin had wrestled Shawn to the ground—and he’d sustained a concussion—he was already in critical condition. They said it was a miracle he hadn’t died the moment his head hit the ground.

I struggle to imagine the scene while they waited for the chopper. Dad said that when the paramedics arrived, Shawn was sobbing, begging for Mother. By the time he reached the hospital, his state of mind had shifted. He stood naked on the gurney, eyes bulging, bloodshot, screaming that he would rip out the eyes of the next bastard who came near him. Then he collapsed into sobs and finally lost consciousness.



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SHAWN LIVED THROUGH THE NIGHT.

In the morning I drove to Buck’s Peak. I couldn’t explain why I wasn’t rushing to my brother’s bedside. I told Mother I had to work.

“He’s asking for you,” she said.

“You said he doesn’t recognize anyone.”

“He doesn’t,” she said. “But the nurse just asked me if he knows someone named Tara. He said your name over and over this morning, when he was asleep and when he was awake. I told them Tara is his sister, and now they’re saying it would be good if you came. He might recognize you, and that would be something. Yours is the only name he’s said since he got to the hospital.”

I was silent.

“I’ll pay for the gas,” Mother said. She thought I wouldn’t come because of the thirty dollars it would cost in fuel. I was embarrassed that she thought that, but then, if it wasn’t the money, I had no reason at all.

“I’m leaving now,” I said.

I remember strangely little of the hospital, or of how my brother looked. I vaguely recall that his head was wrapped in gauze, and that when I asked why, Mother said the doctors had performed a surgery, cutting into his skull to relieve some pressure, or stop a bleed, or repair something—actually, I can’t remember what she said. Shawn was tossing and turning like a child with a fever. I sat with him for an hour. A few times his eyes opened, but if he was conscious, he didn’t recognize me.

When I came the next day, he was awake. I walked into the room and he blinked and looked at Mother, as if to check that she was seeing me, too.

“You came,” he said. “I didn’t think you would.” He took my hand and then fell asleep.

I stared at his face, at the bandages wrapped around his forehead and over his ears, and was bled of my bitterness. Then I understood why I hadn’t come sooner. I’d been afraid of how I would feel, afraid that if he died, I might be glad.