It was a rainless summer. The sun blazed across the sky each

afternoon, scorching the mountain with its arid, desiccating heat, so
that each morning when I crossed the field to the barn, I felt stalks of
wild wheat crackle and break beneath my feet.

I spent an amber morning making the Rescue Remedy homeopathic
for Mother. I would take fifteen drops from the base formula—which
was kept in Mother’s sewing cupboard, where it would not be used or
polluted—and add them to a small bottle of distilled water. Then I
would make a circle with my index finger and my thumb, and push the
bottle through the circle. The strength of the homeopathic, Mother
said, depended on how many passes the bottle made through my
fingers, how many times it drew on my energy. Usually I stopped at
fifty.

Dad and Luke were on the mountain, in the junkyard above the
upper pasture, a quarter mile from the house. They were preparing
cars for the crusher, which Dad had hired for later that week. Luke was
seventeen. He had a lean, muscular build and, when outdoors, an easy
smile. Luke and Dad were draining gasoline from the tanks. The
crusher won’t take a car with the fuel tank attached, because there’s a
risk of explosion, so every tank had to be drained and removed. It was
slow work, puncturing the tank with a hammer and stake, then waiting
for the fuel to drip out so the tank could be safely removed with a
cutting torch. Dad had devised a shortcut: an enormous skewer, eight
feet tall, of thick iron. Dad would lift a car with the forklift, and Luke
would guide him until the car’s tank was suspended directly over the
spike. Then Dad would drop the forks. If all went well, the car would be
impaled on the spike and gasoline would gush from the tank,
streaming down the spike and into the flat-bottom container Dad had