Notes
1 Except for my sister Audrey, who broke an arm and a leg when she was
young. She was taken to get a cast.
2 While everyone agrees that there were many years in which my parents did
not have a phone, there is considerable disagreement in the family about
which years they were. I’ve asked my brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins,
but I have not been able to definitively establish a timeline, and have
therefore relied on my own memories.
3 Since the writing of this story, I have spoken to Luke about the incident.
His account differs from both mine and Richard’s. In Luke’s memory, Dad
took Luke to the house, administered a homeopathic for shock, then put
him in a tub of cold water, where he left him to go fight the fire. This goes
against my memory, and against Richard’s. Still, perhaps our memories are
in error. Perhaps I found Luke in a tub, alone, rather than on the grass.
What everyone agrees upon, strangely, is that somehow Luke ended up on
the front lawn, his leg in a garbage can.
4 My account of Shawn’s fall is based on the story as it was told to me at the
time. Tyler was told the same story; in fact, many of the details in this
account come from his memory. Asked fifteen years later, others
remember it differently. Mother says Shawn was not standing on a pallet,
only on forklift tines. Luke remembers the pallet, but substitutes a metal
drain, with the grating removed, in place of the rebar. He says the fall was
twelve feet, and that Shawn began acting strangely as soon as he regained
consciousness. Luke has no memory of who dialed 9-11, but says there
were men working in a nearby mill, and he suspects that one of them called
immediately after Shawn fell.
5 Asked fifteen years later, Dwain did not recall being there. But he is there,
vividly, in my memory.
6 It is possible that my timeline is off here by one or two days. According to
some who were there, although my father was horribly burned, he did not
seem in any real danger until the third day, when the scabbing began,
making it difficult to breathe. Dehydration compounded the situation. In