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 287 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  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.” —I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE whose feet were searching for solid ground. For six months after the car accident, Mother had improved steadily and we’d thought she would fully recover. The headaches had become less frequent, so that she was shutting herself in the basement only two or three days a week. Then the healing had slowed. Now it had been nine months. The headaches persisted, and Mother’s memory was erratic. At least twice a week she’d ask me to cook breakfast long after everyone had eaten and the dishes had been cleared. She’d tell me to weigh a pound of yarrow for a client, and I’d remind her that we’d delivered the yarrow the day before. She’d begin mixing a tincture, then a minute later couldn’t remember which ingredients she’d added, so that the whole batch had to be tossed. Sometimes she would ask me to stand next to her and watch, so I could say, “You already added the lobelia. Next is the blue vervain.” Mother began to doubt whether she would ever midwife again, and while she was saddened by this, Dad was devastated. His face sagged every time Mother turned a woman away. “What if I have a migraine when she goes into labor?” she told him. “What if I can’t remember what herbs I’ve given her, or the baby’s heart rate?” In the end it wasn’t Dad who convinced Mother to midwife again.

• From Educated (2018)

  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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Then he would change that story: Instead of setting fire to the house, he will kill my mother in bed, and in the morning, when I go wake her, she’ll be dead, and I’ll be left alone with him. Some nights I would change beds with my mother after he went to sleep—they didnt sleep in the same room—and I surrounded the bed with sticks, chairs. The slightest noise, and I would reach for a stick to beat him away. In the early morning, before he woke, my mother would change beds with me again. Once—without him, because he was working on his music—we were going to take a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico: my mother, my sister and her husband my older brother and his wife, and I. My mother prepared food that night In the morning, before dawn, I woke my mother and went to my sister’s house to wake her. When I returned, I saw my mother in our backyard (under the paradoxically serene star-splashed sky). “Dont go in!” she yells at me. I ran inside, and my father is standing menacingly over the table where the food we were taking is. Swiftly I reached for the food, and he lunges at me with a knife, slicing past me only inches short of my stomach. By then, my sister’s husband was there holding him back.... There was a wine-red ring my father wore. As a tie-pin, before being set into the gold ring-frame, it had belonged to his father, and before that to his father’s father—and it was a ruby, my father told me—a ruby so precious that it was his most treasured possession, which he clung to. As he sat moodily staring at his music one particularly poor day, he called me over. Quickly, he gave me the ring. The red stone in the gold frame glowed for me more brilliantly than anything has ever since. A few days later he took it back. During one of those rare, rare times when there was a kind of determined truce between us—an unspoken, smoldering hatred—I was crossing the street with him. He was quite old then, and he carried a cane. As we crossed, he stumbled on the cane, fell to the street Without waiting an instant, I run to the opposite side, and I stand hoping for some miraculous avenging car to plunge over him. But it didnt come. I went back to him, helped him up, and we walked the rest of the way in thundering silence. And then, when I was older, possibly 13 or 14, I was sitting one afternoon on the porch loathing him. My hatred for him by then had become a thing which overwhelmed me, which obsessed me the length of the day. He stood behind me, and he put his hand on me, softly, and said—gently: “Youre my son, and I love you.”

• From Educated (2018)

  “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself,” he said, “as send them down the road to that school.” God told Dad to share the revelation with the people who lived and farmed in the shadow of Buck’s Peak. On Sundays, nearly everyone gathered at the church, a hickory-colored chapel just off the highway with the small, restrained steeple common to Mormon churches. Dad cornered fathers as they left their pews. He started with his cousin Jim, who listened good-naturedly while Dad waved his Bible and explained the sinfulness of milk. Jim grinned, then clapped Dad on the shoulder and said no righteous God would deprive a man of homemade strawberry ice cream on a hot summer afternoon. Jim’s wife tugged on his arm. As he slid past us I caught a whiff of manure. Then I remembered: the big dairy farm a mile north of Buck’s Peak, that was Jim’s. —AFTER DAD TOOK UP preaching against milk, Grandma jammed her fridge full of it. She and Grandpa only drank skim but pretty soon it was all there—two percent, whole, even chocolate. She seemed to believe this was an important line to hold. Every morning, my family sat around a large table of reworked red oak and ate either seven-grain cereal, with honey and molasses, or seven-grain pancakes, also with honey and molasses. Because there were nine of us, the pancakes were never cooked all the way through. I didn’t mind the cereal if I could soak it in milk, letting the cream gather up the grist and seep into the pellets, but since the revelation we’d been having it with water. It was like eating a bowl of mud. It wasn’t long before I began to think of all that milk spoiling in Grandma’s fridge. Then I got into the habit of skipping breakfast each morning and going straight to the barn. I’d slop the pigs and fill the trough for the cows and horses, then I’d hop over the corral fence, loop around the barn and step through Grandma’s side door. On one such morning, as I sat at the counter watching Grandma pour a bowl of cornflakes, she said, “How would you like to go to school?” “I wouldn’t like it,” I said. “How do you know,” she barked. “You ain’t never tried it.” She poured the milk and handed me the bowl, then she perched at the bar, directly across from me, and watched as I shoveled spoonfuls into my mouth. “We’re leaving tomorrow for Arizona,” she told me, but I already knew. She and Grandpa always went to Arizona when the weather began to turn. Grandpa said he was too old for Idaho winters; the cold put an ache in his bones. “Get yourself up real early,” Grandma said, “around five, and we’ll take you with us. Put you in school.” I shifted on my stool. I tried to imagine school but couldn’t.

• From Educated (2018)

  If you bring it you might use it, that’s how things are. A fistfight can turn into a gunfight real quick.” Shawn spoke calmly, thoughtfully. His blond hair was filthy and uncut, growing wild, and his face was covered in stubble the color of shale. His eyes shone from under the oil and dirt, blazes of blue in clouds of ash. His expression, as well as his words, seemed to belong to a much older man, a man whose hot blood had cooled, who was at peace. Shawn turned to me. I had been avoiding him, but suddenly that seemed unfair. He had changed; it was cruel to pretend he hadn’t. He asked if I’d like to go for a drive, and I said I would. Shawn wanted ice cream so we got milkshakes. The conversation was calm, comfortable, like it had been years before on those dusky evenings in the corral. He told me about running the crew without Dad, about Peter’s frail lungs—about the surgeries and the oxygen tubes he still wore at night. We were nearly home, only a mile from Buck’s Peak, when Shawn cranked the wheel and the car skidded on the ice. He accelerated through the spin, the tires caught, and the car leapt onto a side road. “Where we going?” I asked, but the road only went one place. The church was dark, the parking lot deserted. Shawn circled the lot, then parked near the main entrance. He switched off the ignition and the headlights faded. I could barely make out the curve of his face in the dark. “You talk much to Audrey?” he said. “Not really,” I said. He seemed to relax, then he said, “Audrey is a lying piece of shit.” I looked away, fixing my eyes on the church spire, visible against the light from the stars. “I’d put a bullet in her head,” Shawn said, and I felt his body shift toward me. “But I don’t want to waste a good bullet on a worthless bitch.” It was crucial that I not look at him. As long as I kept my eyes on the spire, I almost believed he couldn’t touch me. Almost. Because even while I clung to this belief, I waited to feel his hands on my neck. I knew I would feel them, and soon, but I didn’t dare do anything that might break the spell of waiting. In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would be me who broke the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control. I stayed still, without thought or motion. The ignition clicked, the engine growled to life. Warm air flooded through the vents. “You feel like a movie?” Shawn said. His voice was casual.

• From Educated (2018)

  I ran outside and saw Luke hobbling across the grass. He screamed for Mother, then collapsed. That’s when I saw that the jeans on his left leg were gone, melted away. Parts of the leg were livid, red and bloody; others were bleached and dead. Papery ropes of skin wrapped delicately around his thigh and down his calf, like wax dripping from a cheap candle. His eyes rolled back in his head. I bolted back into the house. I’d packed the new bottles of Rescue Remedy, but the base formula still sat on the counter. I snatched it and ran outside, then dumped half the bottle between Luke’s twitching lips. There was no change. His eyes were marble white. One brown iris slipped into view, then the other. He began to mumble, then to scream. “It’s on fire! It’s on fire!” he roared. A chill passed through him and his teeth clattered; he was shivering. I was only ten, and in that moment I felt very much a child. Luke was my big brother; I thought he would know what to do, so I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, hard. “Should I make you cold or make you hot?” I shouted. He answered with a gasp. The burn was the injury, I reasoned. It made sense to treat it first. I fetched a pack of ice from the chest freezer on the patio, but when the pack touched his leg he screamed—a back-arching, eye-popping scream that made my brain claw at my skull. I needed another way to cool the leg. I considered unloading the chest freezer and putting Luke inside it, 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.

• From Educated (2018)

  He grabbed my wrist and my body slipped into the familiar posture, 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. Tyler cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want to know,” he said. Then, turning to me: “Go, get out of here.” “She’s not going anywhere,” Shawn repeated, flashing the key ring. Tyler tossed me his own keys. “Just go,” he said. I ran to Tyler’s car, which was wedged between Shawn’s truck and the chicken coop. I tried to back out, but I stomped too hard on the gas and the tires spun out, sending gravel flying. On my second attempt I succeeded. The car shot backward and circled around.

• From Educated (2018)

  He waited for me to look at him, and when I didn’t he reached out and took my hand. Gently, as if he were unfolding the petals of a rose, he peeled open my fingers and dropped something into them. I felt the cold of the blade before I saw it, and sensed the blood even before I glimpsed the red streak staining my palm. The knife was small, only five or six inches long and very thin. The blade glowed crimson. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, then brought them to my nose and inhaled. Metallic. It was blood. Not mine—he’d merely handed me the knife—but whose? “If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.” “That’s uncalled for,” Mother said. I gaped at Mother, then at Shawn. It must have seemed to them that I'd been struck dumb, but I couldn’t grasp what was happening well enough to respond to it. I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me. I stared at the blade. Dad began a lecture, pausing often so Mother could ratify his remarks. I heard voices, among them my own, chanting harmonies in an ancient hall. I heard laughter, the slosh of wine being poured from a bottle, the tinkle of butter knives tapping porcelain. I heard little of my father’s speech, but I remember exactly, as if it were happening now, being transported over an ocean and back through three sunsets, to the night I had sung with my friends in the chamber choir. I must have fallen asleep, I thought. Too much wine. Too much Christmas turkey. Having decided I was dreaming, I did what one does in dreams: I tried to understand and use the rules of this queer reality. I reasoned with the strange shadows impersonating my family, and when reasoning failed, I lied. The impostors had bent reality. Now it was my turn. I told Shawn I hadn’t said anything to Dad. I said things like “I don’t know how Dad got that idea” and “Dad must have misheard me,” hoping that if I rejected their percipience, they would simply dissipate. An hour later, when the four of us were still seated on the sofas, I finally came to terms with their physical persistence. They were here, and so was I. The blood on my hands had dried. The knife lay on the carpet, forgotten by everyone except me.

• From Educated (2018)

  She lacked faith and that’s why she’s dead. God won’t heal the faithless.” Mother nodded but never looked up. “Grandma’s sin was serious,” Dad said. “But your sins are more serious still, because you were given the truth and have turned from it.” The room was quiet except for the dull hum of traffic on Oxford Street. Dad’s eyes were fixed on me. It was the gaze of a seer, of a holy oracle whose power and authority were drawn from the very universe. I wanted to meet it head-on, to prove I could withstand its weight, but after a few seconds something in me buckled, some inner force gave way, and my eyes dropped to the floor. “I am called of God to testify that disaster lies ahead of you,” Dad said. “It is coming soon, very soon, and it will break you, break you utterly. It will knock you down into the depths of humility. And when you are there, when you are lying broken, you will call on the Divine Father for mercy.” Dad’s voice, which had risen to fever pitch, now fell to a murmur. “And He will not hear you.” I met his gaze. He was burning with conviction; I could almost feel the heat rolling off him. He leaned forward so that his face was nearly touching mine and said, “But I will.” The silence settled, undisturbed, oppressive. “I will offer, one final time, to give you a blessing,” he said. The blessing was a mercy. He was offering me the same terms of surrender that he had offered my sister. I imagined what a relief it must have been for her, to realize she could trade her reality—the one she shared with me—for his. How grateful she must have felt to pay such a modest price for her betrayal. I could not judge her for her choice, but in that moment I knew I could not choose it for myself. Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon; it was me. Dad reached into his pocket and withdrew a vial of consecrated oil, which he placed in my palm. I studied it. This oil was the only thing needed to perform the ritual, that and the holy authority resting in his misshapen hands. I imagined my surrender, imagined closing my eyes and recanting my blasphemies.

• From Educated (2018)

  The front half of the car had been compressed, the engine arched, curving back over itself, like a fold in solid rock. There was a glare on the windshield from the morning sun. I saw crisscrossing patterns of fissures and cracks. The sight was familiar. I’d seen hundreds of shattered windshields in the junkyard, each one unique, with its particular spray of gossamer extruding from the point of impact, a chronicle of the collision. The cracks on our windshield told their own story. Their epicenter was a small ring with fissures circling outward. The ring was directly in front of the passenger seat. “You okay?” Dad pleaded. “Honey, can you hear me?” Mother was in the passenger seat. Her body faced away from the window. I couldn’t see her face, but there was something terrifying in the way she slumped against her seat. “Can you hear me?” Dad said. He repeated this several times. Eventually, in a movement so small it was almost imperceptible, I saw the tip of Mother’s ponytail dip as she nodded. Dad stood, looking at the active power lines, looking at the earth, looking at Mother. Looking helpless. “Do you think—should I call an ambulance?” I think I heard him say that. And if he did, which surely he must have, Mother must have whispered a reply, or maybe she wasn’t able to whisper anything, I don’t know. I’ve always imagined that she asked to be taken home. I was told later that the farmer whose tractor we’d hit rushed from his house. He’d called the police, which we knew would bring trouble because the car wasn’t insured, and none of us had been wearing seatbelts. It took perhaps twenty minutes after the farmer informed Utah Power of the accident for them to switch off the deadly current pulsing through the lines. Then Dad lifted Mother from the station wagon and I saw her face—her eyes, hidden under dark circles the size of plums, and the swelling distorting her soft features, stretching some, compressing others. I don’t know how we got home, or when, but I remember that the mountain face glowed orange in the morning light. Once inside, I watched Tyler spit streams of crimson down the bathroom sink. His front teeth had smashed into the steering wheel and been displaced, so that they jutted backward toward the roof of his mouth. Mother was laid on the sofa. She mumbled that the light hurt her eyes. We closed the blinds. She wanted to be in the basement, where there were no windows, so Dad carried her downstairs and I didn’t see her for several hours, not until that evening, when I used a dull flashlight to bring her dinner. When I saw her, I didn’t know her. Both eyes were a deep purple, so deep they looked black, and so swollen I couldn’t tell whether they were open or closed. She called me Audrey, even after I corrected her twice.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  What struck me most was the eerie violet light that suffused the whole place. Its source was a seventy-five-gallon saltwater fish tank. After clearing a place for me on the sofa, Johnson patted the tank and explained. Most newly divorced guys like to prowl singles bars, but Johnson spent his nights prowling under the Seal Beach pier, looking for rare fish. He captured them with something called a “slurp gun,” which he waved under my nose. It looked like a prototype for the first-ever vacuum cleaner. I asked how it worked. Just stick this nozzle into shallow water, he said, and suck up the fish into a plastic tube, then into a small chamber. Then shoot it into your bucket and schlep it home. He’d managed to accumulate a wide variety of exotic creatures—seahorses, opal-eye perch—which he showed me with pride. He pointed out the jewel of his collection, a baby octopus he’d named Stretch. “Speaking of which,” Johnson said. “Feeding time.” He reached into a paper sack and pulled out a live crab. “Come on, Stretch,” he said, dangling the crab over the tank. The octopus didn’t stir. Johnson lowered the crab, legs wriggling, onto the tank’s sand-strewn floor. Still no reaction from Stretch. “He dead?” I asked. “Watch,” Johnson said. The crab danced left and right, panicking, seeking cover. There was none, however. And Stretch knew it. After a few minutes something emerged tentatively from Stretch’s undercarriage. An antenna or tentacle. It unfurled toward the crab and lightly tapped its carapace. Yoo-hoo? “Stretch just injected poison in the crab,” Johnson said, grinning like a proud dad. We watched the crab slowly stop dancing, stop moving altogether. We watched Stretch gently wrap his antenna-tentacle around the crab and drag it back to his lair, a hole he’d dug into the sand beneath a big rock. It was a morbid puppet show, a dark kabuki play, starring a witless victim and a micro-kraken—was it a sign, a metaphor for our dilemma? One living thing being eaten by another? This was nature, wet in tooth and claw, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was also to be the story of Blue Ribbon and the Marlboro Man. We spent the rest of the evening sitting at Johnson’s kitchen table and going over the letter from his Long Island informant. He read it aloud, and then I read it silently, and then we debated what to do. “Get thee to Japan,” Johnson said. “What?” “You gotta go,” he said. “Tell them about the work we’ve done. Demand your rights. Kill this Marlboro Man once and for all. Once he starts selling running shoes, once he really gets going, there will be no stopping him. Either we draw a line in the sand, right now, or it’s over.”

• From Educated (2018)

  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 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.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Don’t give them any more rope to hang me with than they already have.” Mother fell into silence. I studied her as she drove. Her face was illuminated by the lights in the dashboard, and it appeared ghostly white set against the utter blackness of country roads. Fear was etched into her features, in the bunching of her forehead and the tightening of her lips. Alone with just me, she put aside the persona she displayed for others. She was her old self again, fragile, breathy. I heard soft whispers and realized they were coming from her. She was chanting what-ifs to herself. What if something went wrong? What if there was a medical history they hadn’t told her about, some complication? Or what if it was something ordinary, a common crisis, and she panicked, froze, failed to stop the hemorrhage in time? In a few minutes we would be there, and she would have two lives in her small, trembling hands. Until that moment, I’d never understood the risk she was taking. “People die in hospitals,” she whispered, her fingers clenching the wheel, wraithlike. “Sometimes God calls them home, and there’s nothing anyone can do. But if it happens to a midwife—” She turned, speaking directly to me. “All it takes is one mistake, and you’ll be visiting me in prison.” We arrived and Mother transformed. She issued a string of commands, to the father, to the mother, and to me. I almost forgot to do what she asked, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I realize now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her. She barked orders and we moved wordlessly to follow them. The baby was born without complications. It was mythic and romantic, being an intimate witness to this turn in life’s cycle, but Mother had been right, I didn’t like it. It was long and exhausting, and smelled of groin sweat. I didn’t ask to go on the next birth. Mother returned home pale and shaking. Her voice quivered as she told me and my sister the story: how the unborn baby’s heart rate had dropped dangerously low, to a mere tremor; how she’d called an ambulance, then decided they couldn’t wait and taken the mother in her own car. She’d driven at such speed that by the time she made it to the hospital, she’d acquired a police escort. In the ER, she’d tried to give the doctors the information they needed without seeming too knowledgeable, without making them suspect that she was an unlicensed midwife. An emergency cesarean was performed. The mother and baby remained in the hospital for several days, and by the time they were released Mother had stopped trembling. In fact, she seemed exhilarated and had begun to tell the story differently, relishing the moment she’d been pulled over by the policeman, who was surprised to find a moaning woman, obviously in labor, in the backseat.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  That small rabbit sat huddled in my mind. It would not go away. It felt like a revenant, something pulled from the past, from back when I was small and the countryside was in crisis. It wasn’t just the rabbits dying. Hawk populations were in freefall from agricultural pesticides. Skeletal elm trees were chopped down and burned. The otters were gone, rivers were poisoned, there were guillemots drowning in oiled seas. Everything was sick. And we’d be next. I knew it. All of us. I knew that one morning there’d be a siren, then a double flash of light on the horizon and I’d look up and see a distant mushroom cloud, and then, on the wind, the fallout would come. Invisible dust. And then everything would be dead. Or we’d go back to the Stone Age, and live in rags huddled around ruins and smoking fires. But even that slim dream of survival was dashed. ‘Are we going to build a nuclear fallout shelter under the garden?’ I asked my parents one afternoon after school. They looked at each other. Maybe they didn’t understand, I thought, so I went on. ‘In the leaflet it says we should build a shelter under the stairs and there’s not very much room under ours for you and me and James.’ There was a long pause, then they gently told me that our house was very close to several very important military targets. ‘There’s no point in worrying,’ they said. ‘There’ll be no fallout. If there’s a war, we won’t even know about it. We’ll be instantly vaporised.’ This, needless to say, did not help at all. I scratched my name on bits of slate and buried them as deep as I could in the garden, under the earth. Maybe they’d survive the apocalypse. The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world. The rabbit was a ghost from the apocalypse of my childhood, and later that week another appeared. This one was not a rabbit, but a book. I had pulled it from my friend’s shelves: a new edition of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, the story of a man obsessively watching wintering wild peregrines in the Essex countryside of the late 1960s. I’d not read it for years. I remembered it as a poetic celebration of nature. But as I started reading it I found it was not like that at all. This, I thought with a chill, comes from the same place as that rabbit. I saw in it the writer’s awful desire for death and annihilation, a desire disguised as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies, falcons as searing-bright and pewter-flashed as reflected sun, already things of memory before they were ever gone.

• From Educated (2018)

  Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was disrespectful. Disrespecting Dad might have been the reason Shawn wore it, but I suspect another reason was that it was large and comfortable and covered the scars from his surgery. He worked short days at first. Dad had a contract to build a milking barn in Oneida County, about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak, so Shawn puttered around the yard, adjusting schematics and measuring I-beams. Luke, Benjamin and I were scrapping. Dad had decided it was time to salvage the angle iron stacked all around the farm. To be sold, each piece had to measure less than four feet. Shawn suggested we use torches to cut the iron, but Dad said it would be too slow and cost too much in fuel. A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. They bit down, their great jaws propelled by a heavy piston attached to a large iron wheel. The wheel was animated by a belt and motor, which meant that if something got caught in the machine, it would take anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute to stop the wheel and halt the blades. Up and down they roared, louder than a passing train as they chewed through iron as thick as a man’s arm. The iron wasn’t being cut so much as snapped. Sometimes it would buck, propelling whoever was holding it toward the dull, chomping blades. Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off. Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured. 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.

• From Educated (2018)

  A middle-aged woman handed out tests and strange pink sheets I’d never seen before. “Excuse me,” I said when she gave me mine. “What is this?” “It’s a bubble sheet. To mark your answers.” “How does it work?” I said. “It’s the same as any other bubble sheet.” She began to move away from me, visibly irritated, as if I were playing a prank. “I’ve never used one before.” She appraised me for a moment. “Fill in the bubble of the correct answer,” she said. “Blacken it completely. Understand?” The test began. I’d never sat at a desk for four hours in a room full of people. The noise was unbelievable, yet I seemed to be the only person who heard it, who couldn’t divert her attention from the rustle of turning pages and the scratch of pencils on paper. When it was over I suspected that I’d failed the math, and I was positive that I’d failed the science. My answers for the science portion couldn’t even be called guesses. They were random, just patterns of dots on that strange pink sheet. I drove home. I felt stupid, but more than stupid I felt ridiculous. Now that I’d seen the other students—watched them march into the classroom in neat rows, claim their seats and calmly fill in their answers, as if they were performing a practiced routine—it seemed absurd that I had thought I could score in the top fifteen percent. That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine. —THERE WAS AN UNUSUALLY hot day that spring, and Luke and I spent it hauling purlins—the iron beams that run horizontally along the length of a roof. The purlins were heavy and the sun relentless. Sweat dripped from our noses and onto the painted iron. Luke slipped out of his shirt, grabbed hold of the sleeves and tore them, leaving huge gashes a breeze could pass through. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything so radical, but after the twentieth purlin my back was sticky with sweat, and I flapped my T-shirt to make a fan, then rolled up my sleeves until an inch of my shoulders was visible. When Dad saw me a few minutes later, he strode over and yanked the sleeves down. “This ain’t a whorehouse,” he said. I watched him walk away and, mechanically, as if I weren’t making the decision, rerolled them. He returned an hour later, and when he caught sight of me he paused mid-step, confused. He’d told me what to do, and I hadn’t done it. He stood uncertainly for a moment, then crossed over to me, took hold of both sleeves and jerked them down. He didn’t make it ten steps before I’d rolled them up again. I wanted to obey. I meant to. But the afternoon was so hot, the breeze on my arms so welcome. It was just a few inches. I was covered from my temples to my toes in grime.

• From Educated (2018)

  It would be past dusk by then—that moment just before night sets in, when the landscape is visible only as darkness and lighter darkness, and you feel the world around you more than you see it. I imagined my brothers spreading over the mountain, searching the black forests. No one would talk; everyone’s thoughts would be the same. Things could go horribly wrong on the mountain. Cliffs appeared suddenly. Feral horses, belonging to my grandfather, ran wild over thick banks of water hemlock, and there were more than a few rattlesnakes. We’d done this search before when a calf went missing from the barn. In the valley you’d find an injured animal; on the mountain, a dead one. I imagined Mother standing by the back door, her eyes sweeping the dark ridge, when my father came home to tell her they hadn’t found me. My sister, Audrey, would suggest that someone ask Grandma, and Mother would say Grandma had left that morning for Arizona. Those words would hang in the air for a moment, then everyone would know where I’d gone. I imagined my father’s face, his dark eyes shrinking, his mouth clamping into a frown as he turned to my mother. “You think she chose to go?” Low and sorrowful, his voice echoed. Then it was drowned out by sounds from another conjured remembrance—crickets, then gunfire, then silence. —THE EVENT WAS A FAMOUS ONE, I would later learn—like Wounded Knee or Waco—but when my father first told us the story, it felt like no one in the world knew about it except us. It began near the end of canning season, which other kids probably called “summer.” My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we’d need in the Days of Abomination. One evening, Dad was uneasy when he came in from the junkyard. He paced the kitchen during dinner, hardly touching a bite. We had to get everything in order, he said. There was little time. We spent the next day boiling and skinning peaches. By sundown we’d filled dozens of Mason jars, which were set out in perfect rows, still warm from the pressure cooker. Dad surveyed our work, counting the jars and muttering to himself, then he turned to Mother and said, “It’s not enough.” That night Dad called a family meeting, and we gathered around the kitchen table, because it was wide and long, and could seat all of us. We had a right to know what we were up against, he said. He was standing at the head of the table; the rest of us perched on benches, studying the thick planks of red oak. “There’s a family not far from here,” Dad said. “They’re freedom fighters. They wouldn’t let the Government brainwash their kids in them public schools, so the Feds came after them.” Dad exhaled, long and slow.

• From Educated (2018)

  We’d taken him on a dozen rides through the open pasture, but he was inexperienced, skittish, unpredictable. That evening, Shawn saddled a new horse, a copper-coated mare, for the first time. She was ready for a short ride, Shawn said, so we mounted, him on the mare, me on Bud. We made it about half a mile up the mountain, moving deliberately so as not to frighten the horses, winding our way through the wheat fields. Then I did something foolish. I got too close to the mare. She didn’t like having the gelding behind her, and with no warning she leapt forward, thrusting her weight onto her front legs, and with her hind legs kicked Bud full in the chest. Bud went berserk. I’d been tying a knot in my reins to make them more secure and didn’t have a firm hold. Bud gave a tremendous jolt, then began to buck, 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.

• From Educated (2018)

  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. —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.

• From Educated (2018)

  A moment later I was standing. I folded napkins from paper towels and put one at each setting. When I placed one at Shawn’s plate, he again jabbed his finger into my ribs. I said nothing. Charles arrived early—Dad hadn’t even come in from the junkyard yet—and sat at the table across from Shawn, who glared at him, never blinking. I didn’t want to leave them alone together, but Mother needed help with the cooking, so I returned to the stove but devised small errands to bring me back to the table. On one of those trips I heard Shawn telling Charles about his guns, and on another, about all the ways he could kill a man. I laughed loudly at both, hoping Charles would think they were jokes. The third time I returned to the table, Shawn pulled me onto his lap. I laughed at that, too. The charade couldn’t last, not even until supper. I passed Shawn carrying a large china plate of dinner rolls, and he stabbed my gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I dropped the plate. It shattered. “Why did you do that?” I shouted. It happened so quickly, I don’t know how he got me to the floor, but again I was on my back and he was on top of me. He demanded that I apologize for breaking the plate. I whispered the apology, quietly, so Charles wouldn’t hear, but this enraged Shawn. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, again near the scalp, for leverage, and yanked me upright, then dragged me toward the bathroom. The movement was so abrupt, Charles had no time to react. The last thing I saw as my head hurled down the hall was Charles leaping to his feet, eyes wide, face pale. My wrist was folded, my arm twisted behind my back. My head was shoved into the toilet so that my nose hovered above the water. Shawn was yelling something but I didn’t hear what. I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall, and when I heard them I became deranged. Charles could not see me like this. He could not know that for all my pretenses—my makeup, my new clothes, my china place settings—this is who I was. I convulsed, arching my body and ripping my wrist away from Shawn. I’d caught him off guard; I was stronger than he’d expected, or maybe just more reckless, and he lost his hold. I sprang for the door. I’d made it through the frame and had taken a step into the hallway when my head shot backward. Shawn had caught me by the hair, and he yanked me toward him with such force that we both tumbled back and into the bathtub. The next thing I remember, Charles was lifting me and I was laughing—a shrill, demented howl.