from them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if
he could just distract me for a few years, the danger would pass. So he
made up jobs for me to do, whether they needed doing or not. One
afternoon, after he’d caught me looking at the math book, he and I
spent an hour hauling buckets of water across the field to his fruit
trees, which wouldn’t have been at all unusual except it was during a
rainstorm.
But if Dad was trying to keep his children from being overly
interested in school and books—from being seduced by the Illuminati,
like Tyler had been—he would have done better to turn his attention to
Richard. Richard was also supposed to spend his afternoons making
tinctures for Mother, but he almost never did. Instead, he’d disappear.
I don’t know if Mother knew where he went, but I did. In the
afternoons, Richard could nearly always be found in the dark
basement, wedged in the crawl space between the couch and the wall,
an encyclopedia propped open in front of him. If Dad happened by
he’d turn the light off, muttering about wasted electricity. Then I’d find
some excuse to go downstairs so I could turn it back on. If Dad came
through again, a snarl would sound through the house, and Mother
would have to sit through a lecture on leaving lights on in empty
rooms. She never scolded me, 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 dragged
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