make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook
the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a
cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg.
I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept
lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of
weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully
conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended
him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching
Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and
exhaustion.
When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I
dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose
bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing
my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead,
praying.
Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or
the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said
there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that
the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a
hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die.
About three weeks after the fire, Mother announced that the skin
around the edges of the burn had begun to grow back, and that she had
hope for even the worst patches. By then Luke was sitting up, and a
week later, when the first cold spell hit, he could stand for a minute or
two on crutches. Before long, he was thumping around the house, thin
as a string bean, swallowing buckets of food to regain the weight he’d
lost. By then, the twine was a family fable.
“A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day
Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather
strap with a steel buckle.
“Not Luke,” Richard said. “He prefers twine, you know how
fashionable he is.”
Luke grinned. “Beauty’s everything,” he said.—FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS I never thought of that day, not in any probing way.
The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon,