sight. Dad slipped out of his flannel shirt and pressed it to my leg. “Go on
home,” he said. “Mother will stop the bleeding.”
I limped through the pasture until Dad was out of sight, then collapsed in
the wheatgrass. I was shaking, gulping mouthfuls of air that never made it to
my lungs. I didn’t understand why I was crying. I was alive. I would be fine.
The angels had done their part. So why couldn’t I stop trembling?
I was light-headed when I crossed the last field and approached the house,
but I burst through the back door, as I’d seen my brothers do, as Robert and
Emma had done, shouting for Mother. When she saw the crimson footprints
streaked across the linoleum, she fetched the homeopathic she used to treat
hemorrhages and shock, called Rescue Remedy, and put twelve drops of the
clear, tasteless liquid under my tongue. She rested her left hand lightly on the
gash and crossed the fingers of her right. Her eyes closed. Click click click.
“There’s no tetanus,” she said. “The wound will close. Eventually. But it’ll
leave a nasty scar.”
She turned me onto my stomach and examined the bruise—a patch of deep
purple the size of a human head—that had formed a few inches above my
hip. Again her fingers crossed and her eyes closed. Click click click.
“You’ve damaged your kidney,” she said. “We’d better make a fresh batch
of juniper and mullein flower.”
The gash below my knee had formed a scab—dark and shiny, a black river
flowing through pink flesh—when I came to a decision.
I chose a Sunday evening, when Dad was resting on the couch, his Bible
propped open in his lap. I stood in front of him for what felt like hours, but he
didn’t look up, so I blurted out what I’d come to say: “I want to go to
school.”
He seemed not to have heard me.
“I’ve prayed, and I want to go,” I said.
Finally, Dad looked up and straight ahead, his gaze fixed on something
behind me. The silence settled, its presence heavy. “In this family,” he said,
“we obey the commandments of the Lord.”
He picked up his Bible and his eyes twitched as they jumped from line to
line. I turned to leave, but before I reached the doorway Dad spoke again.
“You remember Jacob and Esau?”
“I remember,” I said.