Educated

Buck’s Peak was unchanged. The Princess was buried in snow but I could see
the deep contours of her legs. Mother was in the kitchen when I arrived,
stirring a stew with one hand and with the other holding the phone and
explaining the properties of motherwort. Dad’s desk was still empty. He was
in the basement, Mother said, in bed. Something had hold of his lungs.
A burly stranger shuffled through the back door. Several seconds passed
before I recognized my brother. Luke’s beard was so thick, he looked like
one of his goats. His left eye was white and dead: he’d been shot in the face
with a paintball gun a few months before. He crossed the room and clapped
me on the back, and I stared into his remaining eye, looking for something
familiar. But it wasn’t until I saw the raised scar on his forearm, a curved
check mark two inches wide from where the Shear had bitten his flesh, that I
was sure this man was my brother.^7 He told me he was living with his wife
and a pack of kids in a mobile home behind the barn, making his money
working oil rigs in North Dakota.
Two days passed. Dad came upstairs every evening and settled himself
into a sofa in the Chapel, where he would cough and watch TV or read the
Old Testament. I spent my days studying or helping Mother.
On the third evening I was at the kitchen table, reading, when Shawn and
Benjamin shuffled through the back door. Benjamin was telling Shawn about
a punch he’d thrown after a fender bender in town. He said that before
climbing out of his truck to confront the other driver, he’d slipped his
handgun into the waistband of his jeans. “The guy didn’t know what he was
getting into,” Benjamin said, grinning.
“Only an idiot brings a gun into a mess like that,” Shawn said.
“I wasn’t gonna use it,” Benjamin muttered.
“Then don’t bring it,” Shawn said. “Then you know you won’t use it. 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