welded in place to collect it.
By noon, they had drained somewhere between thirty and forty cars.
Luke had collected the fuel in five-gallon buckets, which he began to
haul across the yard to Dad’s flatbed. On one pass he stumbled,
drenching his jeans in a gallon of gas. The summer sun dried the
denim in a matter of minutes. He finished hauling the buckets, then
went home for lunch.
I remember that lunch with unsettling clarity. I remember the
clammy smell of beef-and-potato casserole, and the jingle of ice cubes
tumbling into tall glasses, which sweated in the summer heat. I
remember Mother telling me I was on dish duty, because she was
leaving for Utah after lunch to consult for another midwife on a
complicated pregnancy. She said she might not make it home for
dinner but there was hamburger in the freezer.
I remember laughing the whole hour. Dad lay on the kitchen floor
cracking jokes about an ordinance that had recently passed in our little
farming village. A stray dog had bitten a boy and everyone was up in
arms. The mayor had decided to limit dog ownership to two dogs per
family, even though the attacking dog hadn’t belonged to anybody at
all.
“These genius socialists,” Dad said. “They’d drown staring up at the
rain if you didn’t build a roof over them.” I laughed so hard at that my
stomach ached.
Luke had forgotten all about the gasoline by the time he and Dad
walked back up the mountain and readied the cutting torch, but when
he jammed the torch into his hip and struck flint to steel, flames burst
from the tiny spark and engulfed his leg.
The part we would remember, would tell and retell so many times it
became family folklore, was that Luke was unable to get out of his
gasoline-soaked jeans. That morning, like every morning, he had
hitched up his trousers with a yard of baling twine, which is smooth
and slippery, and needs a horseman’s knot to stay in place. His
footwear didn’t help, either: bulbous steel-toed boots so tattered that
for weeks he’d been duct-taping them on each morning, then cutting
them off each night with his pocketknife. Luke might have severed the
twine and hacked through the boots in a matter of seconds, but he
went mad with panic and took off, dashing like a marked buck,