him, and the desperation. He leans forward, jaw set, eyes narrow,
searching his son’s face for some sign of agreement, some crease of
shared conviction. He doesn’t find it.
—THE STORY OF HOW TYLER decided to leave the mountain is a strange one,
full of gaps and twists. It begins with Tyler himself, with the bizarre
fact of him. It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t
fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our
family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a
jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to
the serene polyphony of his.
Tyler liked books, he liked quiet. He liked organizing and arranging
and labeling. Once, Mother found a whole shelf of matchboxes in his
closet, stacked by year. Tyler said they contained his pencil shavings
from the past five years, which he had collected to make fire starters
for our “head for the hills” bags. The rest of the house was pure
confusion: piles of unwashed laundry, oily and black from the
junkyard, littered the bedroom floors; in the kitchen, murky jars of
tincture lined every table and cabinet, and these were only cleared
away to make space for even messier projects, perhaps to skin a deer
carcass or strip Cosmoline off a rifle. But in the heart of this chaos,
Tyler had half a decade’s pencil shavings, cataloged by year.
My brothers were like a pack of wolves. They tested each other
constantly, with scuffles breaking out every time some young pup hit a
growth spurt and dreamed of moving up. When I was young these
tussles usually ended with Mother screaming over a broken lamp or
vase, but as I got older there were fewer things left to break. Mother
said we’d owned a TV once, when I was a baby, until Shawn had put
Tyler’s head through it.
While his brothers wrestled, Tyler listened to music. He owned the
only boom box I had ever seen, and next to it he kept a tall stack of CDs
with strange words on them, like “Mozart” and “Chopin.” One Sunday
afternoon, when he was perhaps sixteen, he caught me looking at
them. I tried to run, because I thought he might wallop me for being in
his room, but instead he took my hand and led me to the stack. “W-
which one do y-you like best?” he said.
One was black, with a hundred men and women dressed in white on