Educated

Shawn returned to work, hobbling unsteadily. He wore an Aussie outback
hat, which was large, wide-brimmed, and made of chocolate-brown oiled
leather. Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but
now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was
disrespectful. Disrespecting Dad might have been the reason Shawn wore it,
but I suspect another reason was that it was large and comfortable and
covered the scars from his surgery.
He worked short days at first. Dad had a contract to build a milking barn in
Oneida County, about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak, so Shawn puttered
around the yard, adjusting schematics and measuring I-beams.
Luke, Benjamin and I were scrapping. Dad had decided it was time to
salvage the angle iron stacked all around the farm. To be sold, each piece had
to measure less than four feet. Shawn suggested we use torches to cut the
iron, but Dad said it would be too slow and cost too much in fuel.
A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve
ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton
pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were
made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by
sharpness but by force and mass. They bit down, their great jaws propelled by
a heavy piston attached to a large iron wheel. The wheel was animated by a
belt and motor, which meant that if something got caught in the machine, it
would take anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute to stop the wheel and
halt the blades. Up and down they roared, louder than a passing train as they
chewed through iron as thick as a man’s arm. The iron wasn’t being cut so
much as snapped. Sometimes it would buck, propelling whoever was holding
it toward the dull, chomping blades.
Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was
the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the
certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly
unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off.
Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense
he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a
gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his
grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured.
Shawn lurched back to the shop, shaking his head. Dad began feeding iron
through the Shear. Each length bucked him forward and twice he nearly
pitched headfirst into the blades. I jammed my eyes shut, knowing that if