into the trailer with a tremendous crash. I was now free, but falling. I
flailed my arms, willing them to seize something that wasn’t plunging
downward. My palm caught hold of the bin’s side wall, which was now
nearly vertical. I pulled myself toward it and hoisted my body over its
edge, then continued my fall. Because I was now falling from the side
of the bin and not the front, I hoped—I prayed—that I was falling
toward the ground and not toward the trailer, which was at that
moment a fury of grinding metal. I sank, seeing only blue sky, waiting
to feel either the stab of sharp iron or the jolt of solid earth.
My back struck iron: the trailer’s wall. My feet snapped over my
head and I continued my graceless plunge to the ground. The first fall
was seven or eight feet, the second perhaps ten. I was relieved to taste
dirt.
I lay on my back for perhaps fifteen seconds before the engine
growled to silence and I heard Dad’s heavy step.
“What happened?” he said, kneeling next to me.
“I fell out,” I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and
there was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if I’d been cut in two.
“How’d you manage that?” Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but
disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought.
It’s a simple thing.
Dad examined the gash in my leg, which had been ripped wide as the
spike had fallen away. It looked like a pothole; the tissue had simply
sunk out of 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 tall 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