Educated

general consensus is that Shawn was standing near the brink, and for no
reason at all stepped backward and lost his footing. He plunged twelve feet,
his body revolving slowly in the air, so that when he struck the concrete wall
with its outcropping of rebar, he hit headfirst, then tumbled the last eight feet
to the dirt.
This is how the fall was described to me, but my mind sketches it
differently—on a white page with evenly spaced lines. He ascends, falls at a
slope, strikes the rebar and returns to the ground. I perceive a triangle. The
event makes sense when I think of it in these terms. Then the logic of the
page yields to my father.
Dad looked Shawn over. Shawn was disoriented. One of his pupils was
dilated and the other wasn’t, but no one knew what that meant. No one knew
it meant there was a bleed inside his brain.
Dad told Shawn to take a break. Luke and Benjamin helped him prop
himself against the pickup, then went back to work.
The facts after this point are even more hazy.
The story I heard was that fifteen minutes later Shawn wandered onto the
site. Dad thought he was ready to work and told him to climb onto the pallet,
and Shawn, who never liked being told what to do, started screaming at Dad
about everything—the equipment, the granary designs, his pay. He screamed
himself hoarse, then just when Dad thought he had calmed down, he gripped
Dad around the waist and flung him like a sack of grain. Before Dad could
scramble to his feet Shawn took off, leaping and howling and laughing, and
Luke and Benjamin, now sure something was very wrong, chased after him.
Luke reached him first but couldn’t hold him; then Benjamin added his
weight and Shawn slowed a little. But it wasn’t until all three men tackled
him—throwing his body to the ground, where, because he was resisting, his
head hit hard—that he finally lay still.
No one has ever described to me what happened when Shawn’s head
struck that second time. Whether he had a seizure, or vomited, or lost
consciousness, I’m not sure. But it was so chilling that someone—maybe
Dad, probably Benjamin—dialed 9-11, which no member of my family had
ever done before.
They were told a helicopter would arrive in minutes. Later the doctors
would speculate that when Dad, Luke and Benjamin had wrestled Shawn to
the ground—and he’d sustained a concussion—he was already in critical