Educated

I drove in a happy stupor. The night was black—that thick darkness that
belongs only in backcountry, where the houses are few and the streetlights
fewer, where starlight goes unchallenged. I navigated the winding highway as
I’d done numberless times before, racing down the Bear River Hill, coasting
through the flat stretch parallel to Fivemile Creek. Up ahead the road climbed
and bent to the right. I knew the curve was there without looking for it, and
wondered at the still headlights I saw shining in the blackness.
I began the ascent. There was a pasture to my left, a ditch to my right. As
the incline began in earnest I saw three cars pulled off near the ditch. The
doors were open, the cab lights on. Seven or eight people huddled around
something on the gravel. I changed lanes to drive around them, but stopped
when I saw a small object lying in the middle of the highway.
It was a wide-brimmed Aussie hat.
I pulled over and ran toward the people clustered by the ditch. “Shawn!” I
shouted.
The crowd parted to let me through. Shawn was facedown on the gravel,
lying in a pool of blood that looked pink in the glare from the headlights. He
wasn’t moving. “He hit a cow coming around the corner,” a man said. “It’s so
dark tonight, he didn’t even see it. We’ve called an ambulance. We don’t dare
move him.”
Shawn’s body was contorted, his back twisted. I had no idea how long an
ambulance might take, and there was so much blood. I decided to stop the
bleeding. I dug my hands under his shoulder and heaved but I couldn’t lift
him. I looked up at the crowd and recognized a face. Dwain.^5 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.