6
Shield and Buckler
The winter after Tyler left, Audrey turned fifteen. She picked up her driver’s
license from the county courthouse and, on her way home, got a job flipping
burgers. Then she took a second job milking cows at four A.M. every
morning. For a year she’d been fighting with Dad, bucking under the
restraints he put on her. Now she had money; she had her own car; we hardly
saw her. The family was shrinking, the old hierarchy compressing.
Dad didn’t have enough of a crew to build hay sheds, so he went back to
scrapping. With Tyler gone, the rest of us were promoted: Luke, at sixteen,
became the eldest son, my father’s right hand, and Richard and I took his
place as grunts.
I remember the first morning I entered the junkyard as one of my father’s
crew. The earth was ice, even the air felt stiff. We were in the yard above the
lower pasture, which was overrun by hundreds of cars and trucks. Some were
old and broken down but most had been wrecked and they looked it—bent,
arched, twisted, the impression they gave was of crumpled paper, not steel. In
the center of the yard there was a lake of debris, vast and deep: leaking car
batteries, tangles of insulated copper wire, abandoned transmissions, rusted
sheets of corrugated tin, antique faucets, smashed radiators, serrated lengths
of luminous brass pipe, and 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