Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 113 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  worked up a sweat, it would turn to ice on their backs. The trough froze solid. We broke the ice but it refroze quickly, so we carried buckets of water to each horse. That night everyone stayed indoors. Mother was blending oils in the kitchen. Dad was in the extension, which I had begun to jokingly call the Chapel. He was lying on the crimson sofa, a Bible resting on his stomach, while Kami and Richard played hymns on the piano. I sat with my laptop on the love seat, near Dad, and listened to the music. I had just begun a message to Drew when something struck the back door. The door burst open, and Emily flew into the room. Her thin arms were wrapped around her body and she was shaking, gasping for breath. She wore no coat, no shoes, nothing but jeans, an old pair I’d left behind, and one of my worn T-shirts. Mother helped her to the sofa, wrapping her in the nearest blanket. Emily bawled, and for several minutes not even Mother could get her to say what had happened. Was everyone all right? Where was Peter? He was fragile, half the size he should have been, and he wore oxygen tubes because his lungs had never fully developed. Had his tiny lungs collapsed, his breathing stopped? The story came out haltingly, between erratic sobs and the clattering of teeth. From what I could tell, when Emily had gone to Stokes that afternoon to buy groceries, she had returned home with the wrong crackers for Peter. Shawn had exploded. “How can he grow if you can’t buy the right food!” he had screamed, then he’d gathered her up and flung her from their trailer, into a snowbank. She’d pounded on the door, begging to be let in, then she’d run up the hillside to the house. I stared at her bare feet as she said this. They were so red, they looked as if they’d been burned. My parents sat with Emily on the sofa, one on each side of her, patting her shoulders and squeezing her hands. Richard paced a few feet behind them. He seemed frustrated, anxious, as if he wanted to explode into action and was only just being held in check. Kami was still seated at the piano. She was staring at the group huddled on the couch, confused. She had not understood Emily. She did not understand why Richard was pacing, or why he paused every few seconds to glance at Dad, waiting for a word or gesture—any signal of what should be done.

• From Educated (2018)

  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

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad never told us the end of the story. We didn’t have a TV or radio, so perhaps he never learned how it ended himself. The last thing I remember him saying about it was, “Next time, it could be us.” Those words would stay with me. I would hear their echo in the chirp of crickets, in the squish of peaches dropping into a glass jar, in the metallic chink of an SKS being cleaned. I would hear them every morning when I passed the railroad car and paused over the chickweed and bull thistle growing where Tyler had buried the rifle. Long after Dad had forgotten about the revelation in Isaiah, and Mother was again hefting plastic jugs of “Western Family 2%” into the fridge, I would remember the Weavers. — IT WAS ALMOST FIVE A.M. I returned to my room, my head full of crickets and gunfire. In the lower bunk, Audrey was snoring, a low, contented hum that invited me to do the same. Instead I climbed up to my bed, crossed my legs and looked out the window. Five passed. Then six. At seven, Grandma appeared and I watched her pace up and down her patio, turning every few moments to gaze up the hill at our house. Then she and Grandpa stepped into their car and pulled onto the highway. When the car was gone, I got out of bed and ate a bowl of bran with water. Outside I was greeted by Luke’s goat, Kamikaze, who nibbled my shirt as I walked to the barn. I passed the go-kart Richard was building from an old lawnmower. I slopped the pigs, filled the trough and moved Grandpa’s horses to a new pasture. After I’d finished I climbed the railway car and looked out over the valley. It was easy to pretend the car was moving, speeding away, that any moment the valley might disappear behind me. I’d spent hours playing that fantasy through in my head but today the reel wouldn’t take. I turned west, away from the fields, and faced the peak. The Princess was always brightest in spring, just after the conifers emerged from the snow, their deep green needles seeming almost black against the tawny browns of soil and bark. It was autumn now. I could still see her but she was fading: the reds and yellows of a dying summer obscured her dark form. Soon it would snow. In the valley that first snow would melt but on the mountain it would linger, burying the Princess until spring, when she would reappear, watchful.

• From Educated (2018)

  on and on. It was endless, a formless mass. Dad led me to its edge. “You know the difference between aluminum and stainless steel?” he said. “I think so.” “Come here.” His tone was impatient. He was used to dictating to grown men. Having to explain his trade to a ten-year-old girl somehow made us both feel small. He yanked out a chunk of shimmering metal. “This here’s aluminum,” he said. “See how it shines? Feel how light it is?” Dad put the piece into my hand. He was right; it was not as heavy as it looked. Next Dad handed me a dented pipe. “This here’s steel,” he said. We began to sort the debris into piles—aluminum, iron, steel, copper— so it could be sold. I picked up a piece of iron. It was dense with bronze rust, and its jagged angles nibbled at my palms. I had a pair of leather gloves, but when Dad saw them he said they’d slow me down. “You’ll get calluses real quick,” he promised as I handed them over. I’d found a hard hat in the shop, but Dad took that, too. “You’ll move slower trying to balance this silly thing on your head,” he said. Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it. Every slab of iron, every ring of copper tubing was a nickel, a dime, a dollar—less if it took more than two seconds to extract and classify—and he constantly weighed these meager profits against the hourly expense of running the house. He figured that to keep the lights on, the house warm, he needed to work at breakneck speed. I never saw Dad carry anything to a sorting bin; he just chucked it, with all the strength he had, from wherever he was standing. The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was an accident, a mishap that would be corrected. I hadn’t yet grasped the rules of this new world. I had bent down, and was reaching for a copper coil, when something massive cut through the air next to me. When I turned to see where it had come from, I caught a steel cylinder full in the stomach. The impact knocked me to the ground. “Oops!” Dad hollered. I rolled

• From Educated (2018)

  head thrust forward, arm coiled around my lower back, wrist folded absurdly onto itself. Like a dance step, my muscles remembered and raced to get ahead of the music. The air poured from my lungs as I tried to bend deeper, to give my wristbone every possible inch of relief. “Say it,” he said. But I was somewhere else. I was in the future. In a few hours, Shawn would be kneeling by my bed, and he’d be so very sorry. I knew it even as I hunched there. “What’s going on?” A man’s voice floated up from the stairwell in the hall. I turned my head and saw a face hovering between two wooden railings. It was Tyler. I was hallucinating. Tyler never came home. As I thought that, I laughed out loud, a high-pitched cackle. What kind of lunatic would come back here once he’d escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That was good. It meant I was close to passing out. I was looking forward to it. Shawn dropped my wrist and again I fell. I looked up and saw that his gaze was fixed on the stairwell. Only then did it occur to me that Tyler was real. Shawn took a step back. He had waited until Dad and Luke were out of the house, away on a job, so his physicality could go unchallenged. Confronting his younger brother—less vicious but powerful in his own way—was more than he’d bargained for. “What’s going on?” Tyler repeated. He eyed Shawn, inching forward. Mother stopped crying. She was embarrassed. Tyler was an outsider now. He’d been gone for so long, he’d been shifted to that category of people who we kept secrets from. Who we kept this from. Tyler moved up the stairs, advancing on his brother. His face was taut, his breath shallow, but his expression held no hint of surprise. It seemed to me that Tyler knew exactly what he was doing, that he had done this before, when they were younger and less evenly matched. Tyler halted his forward march but he didn’t blink. He glared at Shawn as if to say, Whatever is happening here, it’s done. Shawn began to murmur about my clothes and what I did in town.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He hears the trees speak, and sees the birth of the world through the eyes and ears of an owl. He discusses mankind’s role in God’s plan with a donnish badger in a comfortably furnished sett. And at the end, his education complete, the Wart pulls the sword from the stone, learns he is the son of Uther Pendragon and is crowned King Arthur . It is a glorious dream of wish-fulfilment for White. He writes himself into the character of the Wart, the boy of unacknowledged royal blood who runs wild around the castle just as he had raced about West Hill House in St Leonards-on-Sea, wild, and happy, and free. White had been torn from safety and sent away to school, but he saves the Wart from such a fate. There would be no beatings in his education. But even so, his lessons are full of cruelty. I did not understand quite how cruel a book it was when I was young. But I responded to that cruelty all the same. Because my favourite part of the book was the Wart’s ordeal as a hawk. It was truly terrifying. I’d read it and squirm, and curl my toes, then read it all over again. Merlyn turns the Wart into his namesake, a merlin, and looses him in the castle mews at night. And as a new officer in the cadre of the castle’s trained hawks, the Wart must undergo the customary ordeal. He is ordered to stand next to Colonel Cully the goshawk until the rest of the hawks ring their bells three times. It is an exquisitely dangerous initiation, for the colonel is insane. As the ordeal begins the goshawk glowers and mutters. He quotes broken snatches of Shakespeare and Webster, run all together in a fugue of rising horror . After the bells ring once the goshawk begs for the test to end, cries, ‘I can’t hold off much longer.’ The bells ring twice. He moves towards the Wart, stamping the perch convulsively: ‘He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.’ In that awful ordeal, White is the Wart, the boy who must be brave. But he is not just the Wart, and the boy is not the only one imperilled. There’s a sad passage in Olivia Laing’s book The Trip to Echo Spring that reminds me of this desperate scene. She quotes the writer John Cheever , whose alcoholism was intimately bound up with his erotic desires for men. He hated his homosexuality and felt himself in constant danger . ‘ Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy,’ he wrote in his journals, ‘was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’ Despite several affairs with women, White’s fantasies were sadistic and directed mostly at pubescent boys.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They knew he didn’t fit, not quite, with the rest of the masters at Stowe. Did you hear about the time he crashed his Bentley into a farmhouse and nearly died? they whispered. And they spoke gleefully of the legendary Monday morning when Mr White arrived late and hungover, ordered the class to write an essay on the dangers of the demon drink, put his feet on his desk, and fell fast asleep. But for all his demonstrations of bravado and skill, Mr White, Mr Terence Hanbury White, known to all as Tim after the chemists’ chain Timothy Whites, was terribly afraid. He was twenty-nine years old, had been a schoolmaster at Stowe for five years and a writer for seven, but he had been afraid as long as he could remember. ‘Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt, and death, I have to attempt them,’ he’d explained in a book of sporting essays, England Have My Bones, published the previous year. He had to be brave. From the schoolroom he’d race at top speed to the aerodrome, his heart tight in his mouth, afraid of stalling, afraid of the instructor’s contempt, afraid of getting into a spin from which he’d never recover, of burying himself in a wreck of crumpled wings and struts and earth. He rode with the Grafton over the muddy fields of Buckinghamshire in perpetual terror that he would fail to be brave, fail to ride well, fail to pass himself off as a gentleman, would incur the wrath of the Master of Foxhounds. And back in India, right at the beginning, where he remembered lizards and fireworks and candlelit darknesses and grown-ups in evening dress, he remembered also the terror of beatings, and arguments, and his mother’s hatred of his father, and his father’s hatred of her, and his drinking, and the endless, awful, violent war between them in which he was the pawn. His mother lavished attention on her dogs and her husband had them shot. She lavished attention on the boy and the boy was convinced he’d be next. ‘I am told,’ he wrote, ‘that my father and mother were to be found wrestling with a pistol, one on either side of my cot, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case beginning with me.’ And then: ‘It was not a safe kind of childhood.’ He brings the end of the fountain pen to his lips and considers what he has written. I pounce upon a bird with cruel talons and desperate beak. It may have been hurting me a little, but it would have hurt much more if I had let go. I held it tight and powerless to harm me, calling for somebody else to help by holding its feet.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I writhed, then, and began to kick; she pushed me to the bed, held me fast upon it with one hand and, with the other, continued to tug the folds of cloth about me. I struggled more fiercely; soon there came the rip of a broken hem. Hearing it, Diana gave a shout: ‘Help me with her, can’t you? Maria! Mrs Hooper! You girl — ’ she meant Zena. ‘Do you want to go back to that damn reformatory?’ Instantly, there came upon me what felt like fifty hands, all pulling at the dress, all pinching me, all grasping at my kicking legs. For an age, they seemed to be upon me. I grew hot and faint beneath the layers of wool. My swollen head was knocked, and began to pulse and ache. Someone placed her thumb — I remember this very clearly — at the top of my thigh, in the slippery hollow of my groin. It might have been Maria. It might have been Mrs Hooper, the housekeeper. At last I lay panting upon the bed, the dress about me. The shoes were placed upon my feet, and laced. ‘Stand up!’ said Diana; and when I had done so she caught me by the shoulder and propelled me from her bedroom, through the parlour, and out into the darkened hall beyond. Behind me, the ladies followed, Mrs Hooper and Maria with Zena gripped between them. When I hesitated, Diana prodded me forwards, so that I almost stumbled and fell. Now, at last, I began to weep. I said, ‘Diana, you cannot mean this -!’ But her gaze was cold. She seized me, and pinched me, and made me walk faster. Down we went - all flushed and panting and fantastically costumed as we were - down through the centre of that tall house, in a great jagged spiral, like a tableau of the damned heading for hell. We passed the drawing-room: there were some ladies there still, lolling upon the cushions, and when they saw us they called, What were we doing? And a lady in our party answered, that Diana had caught her boy and her maid in her own bed, and was throwing them out - they must be sure to come and watch it. And so, the lower we went, the greater came the press of ladies at my back, and the louder the laughter and the ribald cries. We reached the basement, and it grew colder; when Diana opened the door that led from the kitchen to the garden at the rear of the house, the wind blew hard upon my weeping eyes, and made them sting. I said, ‘You cannot, you cannot!’ The cold was sobering me.

• From Educated (2018)

  remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him. — I WAS LYING ON MY BED, watching the shadows my feeble lamp cast on the ceiling, when I heard my father’s voice at the door. Instinctively I jerked to my feet in a kind of salute, but once I was standing I wasn’t sure what to do. There was no precedent for this: my father had never visited my room before. He strode past me and sat on my bed, then patted the mattress next to him. I took my seat, nervously, my feet barely touching the floor. I waited for him to speak, but the moments passed silently. His eyes were closed, his jaw slackened, as if he were listening to seraphic voices. “I’ve been praying,” he said. His voice was soft, a loving voice. “I’ve been praying about your decision to go to college.” His eyes opened. His pupils had dilated in the lamplight, absorbing the hazel of the iris. I’d never seen eyes so given over to blackness; they seemed unearthly, tokens of spiritual power. “The Lord has called me to testify,” he said. “He is displeased. You have cast aside His blessings to whore after man’s knowledge. His wrath is stirred against you. It will not be long in coming.” I don’t remember my father standing to leave but he must have, while I sat, gripped by fear. God’s wrath had laid waste to cities, it had flooded the whole earth. I felt weak, then wholly powerless. I remembered that my life was not mine. I could be taken out of my body at any moment, dragged heavenward to reckon with a furious Father. The next morning I found Mother mixing oils in the kitchen. “I’ve decided not to go to BYU,” I said. She looked up, fixing her eyes on the wall behind me, and whispered, “Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear that.” I didn’t understand. I’d thought she would be glad to see me yield to God. Her gaze shifted to me. I hadn’t felt its strength in years and I was stunned by it. “Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler—that was a surprise—but you. Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Confused, he fell asleep, and it was only when he dreamed he was surrounded by reindeer urging him to leave that he saw what he had done. That story made me shiver when I read it, because that was what it was like. I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn’t eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn’t certain who or what I was. In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed – in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be – her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I’d thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing. What I’d read in The Sword in the Stone encouraged me to think it, too, as a good and instructive thing; a lesson in life for the child who would be king. But now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same. Two days before the service something very strange happened on the hill. We’d been walking up a hedgerow running down the edge of a field of undersown stubble. There was a pheasant in the hedge; I’d heard it cluck and run, rat-wise, along the damp and nettly ditch, and Mabel had heard it too. She’d crashed over the hedge and perched out of sight at the top, facing away from me. Her blood was up and mine too. I shouldered my way into the hedge, knowing that any second now the pheasant would rocket out in front of me in a burnished clatter of feathers. I pushed my head through the hedge. Heard a whoosh of air and felt a staggering blow. I reeled. Coshed by a goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head. She’d bounced off me, left eight talon incisions behind, and was back at the top of the tree, craning to see the pheasant, which had done what all pheasants do best: escape. I shook my head dully. She thought I was the pheasant. She didn’t know it was me. A strange buzzing in my ears, and then a muffled calm as the endorphins kicked in. I held my hand out and whistled her down to my fist, then mechanically started working the rest of the hedge-line.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Truthfully, she did frighten me, but I watch her coolly as she studies my palm. “You can get Lost mighty bad,” she warned, staring into my hand. “I dont mean lost in the streets or in the Quarter. I mean: Lost deep down. Inside. In your Soul.... This is an evil city, boy.” She smells rotten. The heat, the odor of stale food, imprisoned for days in this airless room, the closeness to this filthy woman, nauseate me. An urchin-boy was standing by the door, picking pecans out of a sticky praline. Now he moves next to me, peering into my palm too. He smells like the woman—his mother, Im convinced: He has the same colorless eyes in the extravagantly brown face. With sugargrimy hands he took my palm. I feel the sticky substance gluing our hands together. “Evil city, boy,” he echoes the woman. And the woman: “He got Powers too. See, he know!” “Thanks for warning me,” I said, forcing my hand away. I walked to the door—the rancid air is choking me. “You wanna stay here?” she asked me. “Lotsa space—see?” She indicates the cluttered room. She can tell Im not interested. “New Orleans is Evil, boy,” she warns me again coaxingly. “I got Powers. They can protect you. You wanna stay here?” “Im staying with a friend,” I lied. “Your palm says be careful,” she insisted, reaching again urgently for my hand. “See?—here it is.” With a long-nailed, heavily ringed finger, she outlined a sign on my hand. The little boy repeats: “Evil city, boy.” “I told you: Im staying with a friend,” I said. “Wont do!” the woman said, shaking her head urgently. “Ive got to go now,” I said. “Look here,” she said, and her voice was no longer sinister; matter-of-fact now, almost business-like now. “I got a real good easy deal for you. Im gonna offer you a job.” “Im not looking for a job,” I told her, regretting my words instantly, because shes looking at me knowingly, pegging me. “Dont have to tell me that,” she said. “I know…Im gonna make it easy for you, though. Gonna offer you a good job.... Mardi Gras, thats the time to scoop up the money!” She snatched at the table to emphasize the promised ease. “How?” “Every way. We decide how. I’ll teach you. You grab em!” Thrusting out her hand, she grabbed me by the arm. Now the blank eyes nail me knowingly, and I resented it “Dont play innocent with me, boy!” she warned, her hand gripping my arm, the long nails almost piercing my flesh. “Save the act for them others,” she said contemptuously. I thrust her arm away angrily. “Innocence,” she whispered. “Innocence may be all right for those that got it. Us that lost it aint never gonna get it back.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  But he laughed. “Is that a joke, or true?” “True,” I said. Then, in that unexpected way, he said this: “If I told you, right now, that I love you—and you believed it—what would you do?” I laughed, but Im sure hes aware that it’s a forced laugh—much like the laughter outside.... I had never stayed around anyone long enough to hear those words, except during the sex-scenes: words spoken over and over by hundreds of people, meaning the same thing each time—nothing.... I remembered that night in New York when I had made the decision that it would be with many, many people—through many rooms, through many parks, through many streets and bars—that I would explore that world. And what, really, had prompted that decision? An attempt to shred the falsely lulling, sheltered innocence of my childhood, yes. But had it also been, at least in part, fear?—a corrosive fear of vulnerability with which the world, with its early manifested coldness, had indoctrinated me; imbued in others: a world which you soon come to see as an emotional jungle; in which you learn very early that you are the sum-total of yourself, nothing more. I laughed again. “Im not sure what I’d do—if you told me that—and I believed it,” I said. “Maybe youre right: Maybe I would run away.... I mean: that word—... ‘love,’” and I had to pause before I could even bring myself to say it, and I smiled in order to emphasize that I wasnt taking the word seriously, “if such a thing exists as other than some sort of way-off thing, Way Out There, somewhere—if it exists more than as merely four letters—like ‘fuck,’” I said, trying to destroy the expected gravity of his answering words, to thwart it by anticipating it, “well, I dont really believe it.” The fact that with this man I can no longer resort to the street act of unconcern—and the intense sobriety after neardrunkenness—make me speak much more easily than I have before. “I guess the whole screwed-up world would have to change before I could feel that there was such a thing.” Laughing purposely now, I said: “And if there is such a thing as what you call ‘love,’ just the mention of it should send rockets into the sky.” “Be careful,” he warned, also laughing. “They may begin to do that outside at any moment. Then where would you be?” He added seriously: “But it doesnt have to be like that. No rockets. Just the absence of loneliness. Thats love enough. In fact, that can be the strongest kind of love.... When you dont believe it’s even possible, then you substitute sex. Life becomes what you fill in with between orgasms.

• From Educated (2018)

  throwing his body in tight circles. The reins flew over his head. I gripped the saddle horn and squeezed my thighs together, curving my legs around his bulging belly. Before I could get my bearings, Bud took off at a dead run straight up a ravine, bucking now and then but running, always running. My foot slipped through a stirrup up to my calf. All those summers breaking horses with Grandpa, and the only advice I remembered him giving was, “Whate’er you do, don’t git your foot caught in the stirrup.” I didn’t need him to explain. I knew that as long as I came off clean, I’d likely be fine. At least I’d be on the ground. But if my foot got caught, I’d be dragged until my head split on a rock. Shawn couldn’t help me, not on that unbroken mare. Hysteria in one horse causes hysteria in others, especially in the young and spirited. Of all Shawn’s horses, there was only one—a seven-year-old buckskin named Apollo—who might have been old enough, and calm enough, to do it: to explode in furious speed, a nostril-flapping gallop, then coolly navigate while the rider detached his body, lifting one leg out of the stirrup and reaching to the ground to catch the reins of another horse wild with fright. But Apollo was in the corral, half a mile down the mountain. My instincts told me to let go of the saddle horn—the only thing keeping me on the horse. If I let go I’d fall, but I’d have a precious moment to reach for the flapping reins or try to yank my calf from the stirrup. Make a play for it, my instincts screamed. Those instincts were my guardians. They had saved me before, guiding my movements on a dozen bucking horses, telling me when to cling to the saddle and when to pitch myself clear of pounding hooves. They were the same instincts that, years before, had prompted me to hoist myself from the scrap bin when Dad was dumping it, because they had understood, even if I had not, that it was better to fall from that great height rather than hope Dad would intervene. All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself. Bud reared, thrusting his head so high I thought he might tumble backward. He landed hard and bucked. I tightened my grip on the horn, making a decision, based on another kind of instinct, not to surrender my hold. Shawn would catch up, even on that unbroken mare. He’d pull off a

• From Educated (2018)

  mine, taking small sips of air each time the van fishtails, then holding her breath as Dad corrects and it snakes back into the lane. She is so rigid, I think she might shatter. My body tenses with hers; together we brace a hundred times for impact. It is a relief when the van finally leaves the road. — I AWOKE TO BLACKNESS. Something ice-cold was running down my back. We’re in a lake! I thought. Something heavy was on top of me. The mattress. I tried to kick it off but couldn’t, so I crawled beneath it, my hands and knees pressing into the ceiling of the van, which was upside down. I came to a broken window. It was full of snow. Then I understood: we were in a field, not a lake. I crawled through the broken glass and stood, unsteadily. I couldn’t seem to gain my balance. I looked around but saw no one. The van was empty. My family was gone. I circled the wreck twice before I spied Dad’s hunched silhouette on a hillock in the distance. I called to him, and he called to the others, who were spread out through the field. Dad waded toward me through the snowdrifts, and as he stepped into a beam from the broken headlights I saw a six-inch gash in his forearm and blood slashing into the snow. I was told later that I’d been unconscious, hidden under the mattress, for several minutes. They’d shouted my name. When I didn’t answer, they thought I must have been thrown from the van, through the broken window, so they’d left to search for me. Everyone returned to the wreck and stood around it awkwardly, shaking, either from the cold or from shock. We didn’t look at Dad, didn’t want to accuse. The police arrived, then an ambulance. I don’t know who called them. I didn’t tell them I’d blacked out—I was afraid they’d take me to a hospital. I just sat in the police car next to Richard, wrapped in a reflective blanket like the one I had in my “head for the hills” bag. We listened to the radio while the cops asked Dad why the van wasn’t insured, and why he’d removed the seats and seatbelts. We were far from Buck’s Peak, so the cops took us to the nearest police station. Dad called Tony, but Tony was trucking long-haul. He tried

• From Educated (2018)

  but the freezer would work only if the lid was shut, and then he’d suffocate. I mentally searched the house. We had a large garbage can, a blue whale of a bin. It was splattered with bits of rotted food, so rank we kept it shut away in a closet. I sprinted into the house and emptied it onto the linoleum, noting the dead mouse Richard had tossed in the day before, then I carried the bin outside and sprayed it out with the garden hose. I knew I should clean it more thoroughly, maybe with dish soap, but looking at Luke, the way he was writhing on the grass, I didn’t feel I had time. With the last bit of slop blasted away, I righted the bin and filled it with water. Luke was scrambling toward me to put his leg in when I heard an echo of my mother’s voice. She was telling someone that the real worry with a burn isn’t the damaged tissue, but infection. “Luke!” I shouted. “Don’t! Don’t put your leg in!” He ignored me and continued crawling toward the bin. He had a cold look in his eye that said nothing mattered except the fire burning from his leg into his brain. I moved quickly. I shoved the bin, and a great wave of water heaved over the grass. Luke made a gargled noise, as if he were choking. I ran back into the kitchen and found the bags that fit the can, then held one open for Luke and told him to put his leg in. He didn’t move, but he allowed me to pull the bag over the raw flesh. I righted the can and stuffed the garden hose inside. While the bin filled, I helped Luke balance on one foot and lower his burned leg, now wrapped in black plastic, into the garbage can. The afternoon air was sweltering; the water would warm quickly; I tossed in the pack of ice. It didn’t take long—twenty minutes, maybe thirty—before Luke seemed in his right mind, calm and able to prop himself up. Then Richard wandered up from the basement. The garbage can was smack in the middle of the lawn, ten feet from any shade, and the afternoon sun was strong. Full of water, the can was too heavy for us to move, and Luke refused to take out his leg, even for a minute. I fetched a straw sombrero Grandma had given us in Arizona. Luke’s teeth were still chattering so I also brought a wool blanket. And there he stood, a sombrero on his head, a wool blanket around his shoulders, and his leg in a garbage can. He

• From Educated (2018)

  This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. In September the twin towers fell. I’d never heard of them until they were gone. Then I watched as planes sank into them, and I stared, bewildered, at the TV as the unimaginably tall structures swayed, then buckled. Dad stood next to me. He’d come in from the junkyard to watch. He said nothing. That evening he read aloud from the Bible, familiar passages from Isaiah, Luke, and the Book of Revelation, about wars and rumors of wars. Three days later, when she was nineteen, Audrey was married—to Benjamin, a blond-haired farm boy she’d met waitressing in town. The wedding was solemn. Dad had prayed and received a revelation: “There will be a conflict, a final struggle for the Holy Land,” he’d said. “My sons will be sent to war. Some of them will not come home.” I’d been avoiding Shawn since the night in the bathroom. He’d apologized. He’d come into my room an hour later, his eyes glassy, his voice croaking, and asked me to forgive him. I’d said that I would, that I already had. But I hadn’t. At Audrey’s wedding, seeing my brothers in their suits, those black uniforms, my rage turned to fear, of some predetermined loss, and I forgave Shawn. It was easy to forgive: after all, it was the End of the

• From Educated (2018)

  the toilet. “Apologize,” he said again. I said nothing. He stuck my head in further, so my nose scraped the stained porcelain. I closed my eyes, but the smell wouldn’t let me forget where I was. I tried to imagine something else, something that would take me out of myself, but the image that came to mind was of Sadie, crouching, compliant. It pumped me full of bile. He held me there, my nose touching the bowl, for perhaps a minute, then he let me up. The tips of my hair were wet; my scalp was raw. I thought it was over. I’d begun to back away when he seized my wrist and folded it, curling my fingers and palm into a spiral. He continued folding until my body began to coil, then he added more pressure, so that without thinking, without realizing, I twisted myself into a dramatic bow, my back bent, my head nearly touching the floor, my arm behind my back. In the parking lot, when Shawn had shown me this hold, I’d moved only a little, responding more to his description than to any physical necessity. It hadn’t seemed particularly effective at the time, but now I understood the maneuver for what it was: control. I could scarcely move, scarcely breathe, without breaking my own wrist. Shawn held me in position with one hand; the other he dangled loosely at his side, to show me how easy it was. Still harder than if I were Sadie, I thought. As if he could read my mind, he twisted my wrist further; my body was coiled tightly, my face scraping the floor. I’d done all I could do to relieve the pressure in my wrist. If he kept twisting, it would break. “Apologize,” he said. There was a long moment in which fire burned up my arm and into my brain. “I’m sorry,” I said. He dropped my wrist and I fell to the floor. I could hear his steps moving down the hall. I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable. I’m only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She curses. Ordinary words fail us: we mouth obscenities in the cause of reassurance. But they are not enough. When I put the phone down I cannot calm myself. I put my hands out flat in front of me, palms down. They are still shaking. Stop freaking out, Helen , I tell myself. It’s OK. Nothing is broken. Everything is fine. But it is not. The earthquake has brought back all those childhood fears of apocalypse: all the expectation that the world would burn and boil. It is a very old, deep terror and it feels now that it has never gone away. The fabric of the world has torn. I cannot stitch it back together . And then I remember Mabel. I’ve heard all the stories about animals fleeing from earthquakes. Oh God. She must be terrified. I race downstairs, three steps at a time, burst through the door and turn on the light in her room. She is asleep. She wakes, pulls her head from her mantle-feathers and looks at me with clear eyes. She’s surprised to see me. She yawns, showing her pink mouth like a cat’s and its arrowhead tongue with its black tip. Her creamy underparts are draped right down over her feet, so only one lemony toe and one carbon-black talon are exposed. Her other foot is drawn high up at her chest. She felt the tremors. And then she went back to sleep, entirely unmoved by the moving earth. The quake brought no panic, no fear, no sense of wrongness to her at all. She’s at home in the world. She’s here. She ducks her head upside down, pleased to see me, shakes her feathers into a fluffy mop of contentment, and then, as I sit with her, she slowly closes her eyes, tucks her head back into her feathers, and sleeps. She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had thought the world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all the terror was gone. She sleeps all the way to Suffolk in my car. Tony’s house is tucked behind trees on a road between two fields and lines of hedgerow elms. I pull into the drive, take Mabel onto my glove and walk across the lawn. He comes out to greet me. We walk together to the high, white-walled aviary behind his mews. He unlocks the door and I step through.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I was frightened of Baker and what he meant. I was not as frightened of White. Despite his disaster with Gos, despite his desire for cruelties and his dreadful politics, White fought hard against death. He loved the small things of the world, and knowing war was coming, he lived in hope of miracles. In Baker’s book I saw no hope at all. For him the world was dying, and his hawks were icons of extinction: ours, theirs and his own. There was no struggle in him. He shared the falcons’ fate; had no choice but to follow them. He was lured towards them just as the gulls and plovers in his book rose helplessly towards the peregrine’s killing strike, just as the compass-beaks of all the small birds hiding in hedges pointed in fear towards the magnet that was the falcon in the air. There were no place names, no people in his book. They’d fallen away. I understood this better now, for I knew the pull of the hawk, and I knew how the world could disappear in the light it cast. But his hawks were made of death. Troubled, I hoped my hawk was life. I hoped it very much. I’d never believed in Baker’s falcons, because I’d met real ones before I’d ever read his book: cheerful, friendly falconer’s birds that preened on suburban lawns. But most of my bird-loving friends read Baker’s book before they ever saw a live one, and now they can’t see real peregrines without them conjuring distance, extinction and death. Wild things are made from human histories. When I was a child I hated what White had thought of his goshawk. But Gos’s hawkish ghost moved behind the patterned, living feathers of my own. And there were still darker ghosts behind him. A few years ago I visited a friend who was at that time the president of the British Falconers’ Club. We chatted over tea and biscuits. We talked about the history of falconry for a while, and the history of the Club, and then he said, ‘Come and look at this.’ And he pulled open a cupboard, and there, right at the back, half-obscured by the usual household bits and bobs, I saw it. ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Gordon, is that it?’ He looked at me and nodded. ‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to have it in the house.’ I crouched down and pulled it out. It was a bronze falcon standing on a vertical plinth, heavy, stylised, and slightly worn around its wings. ‘Shit, Gordon. This freaks me out,’ I said. ‘Me too,’ he replied. The statuette was very valuable, and very beautifully made, but it was a thing that both of us wished had never been made at all.

• From Educated (2018)

  over on the ice, winded. By the time I’d scrambled to my feet, Dad had launched something else. I ducked but lost my footing and fell. This time I stayed down. I was shaking but not from cold. My skin was alive and tingling with the certainty of danger, yet when I looked for the source of that danger, all I could see was a tired old man, tugging on a broken light fixture. I remembered all the times I’d seen one of my brothers burst through the back door, howling, pinching some part of his body that was gashed or squashed or broken or burned. I remembered two years before, when a man named Robert, who worked for Dad, had lost a finger. I remembered the otherworldly pitch of his scream as he ran to the house. I remembered staring at the bloody stump, and then at the severed finger, which Luke brought in and placed on the counter. It looked like a prop from a magic trick. Mother put it on ice and rushed Robert to town so the doctors could sew it back on. Robert’s was not the only finger the junkyard had claimed. A year before Robert, Shawn’s girlfriend, Emma, had come through the back door shrieking. She’d been helping Shawn and lost half her index. Mother had rushed Emma to town, too, but the flesh had been crushed, and there was nothing they could do. I looked at my own pink fingers, and in that moment the junkyard shifted. As children, Richard and I had passed countless hours in the debris, jumping from one mangled car to the next, looting some, leaving others. It had been the backdrop for a thousand imagined battles— between demons and wizards, fairies and goons, trolls and giants. Now it was changed. It had ceased to be my childhood playground and had become its own reality, one whose physical laws were mysterious, hostile. I was remembering the strange pattern the blood had made as it streaked down Emma’s wrist, smearing across her forearm, when I stood and, still shaking, tried to pry loose the small length of copper tubing. I almost had it when Dad flung a catalytic converter. I leapt aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank. I wiped the blood on my jeans and shouted, “Don’t throw them here! I’m here!” Dad looked up, surprised. He’d forgotten I was there. When he saw the blood, he walked over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “God and his angels are here, working right alongside us. They won’t let you be hurt.”