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