which makes me wonder if she did know where Richard was. If I couldn’t get
back down to turn on the light, Richard would pull the book to his nose and
read in the dark; he wanted to read that badly. He wanted to read the
encyclopedia that badly.
Tyler was gone. There was hardly a trace he’d ever lived in the house, except
one: every night, after dinner, I would close the door to my room and pull
Tyler’s old boom box from under my bed. I’d drag his desk into my room,
and while the choir sang I would settle into his chair and study, just as I’d
seen him do on a thousand nights. I didn’t study history or math. I studied
religion.
I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly,
then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference,
and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one
read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had
studied for himself and himself only. I worked through the Old Testament
next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the
speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language
was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I
understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began
to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of
pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While
the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure
philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of
my study.
In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter:
the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow
strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The
skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not
yet understand.
By the time the snow on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly
callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: I’d learned to
listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s lips whenever he tossed something
heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud,
I didn’t salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill.