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.
The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music,
drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the
sounds that played in my head at night now—the jingle of corrugated
tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron.
I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my
father’s eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them,
watching us scrap, stepping forward and catching the car batteries or
jagged lengths of steel tubing that Dad launched across the yard. I’d
stopped shouting at Dad for throwing them. Instead, I prayed.
I worked faster when I salvaged alone, so one morning when Dad
was in the northern tip of the yard, near the mountain, I headed for the
southern tip, near the pasture. I filled a bin with two thousand pounds
of iron; then, my arms aching, I ran to find Dad. The bin had to be
emptied, and I couldn’t operate the loader—a massive forklift with a
telescopic arm and wide, black wheels that were taller than I was. The
loader would raise the bin some twenty-five feet into the air and then,