behind the corral, tethered with an intricate knot that nobody used except her
father, Lott.
Sometimes, when I was at Grandma’s eating the forbidden cornflakes and
milk, I’d ask Grandpa to tell me how he got off the mountain. He always said
he didn’t know. Then he’d take a deep breath—long and slow, like he was
settling into a mood rather than a story—and he’d tell the whole tale from
start to finish. Grandpa was a quiet man, near silent. You could pass a whole
afternoon clearing fields with him and never hear ten words strung together.
Just “Yep” and “Not that one” and “I reckon so.”
But ask how he got down the mountain that day and he’d talk for ten
minutes, even though all he remembered was lying in the field, unable to
open his eyes, while the hot sun dried the blood on his face.
“But I tell you this,” Grandpa would say, taking off his hat and running his
fingers over the dent in his skull. “I heard things while I was lyin’ in them
weeds. Voices, and they was talking. I recognized one, because it was
Grandpa Lott. He was a tellin’ somebody that Albert’s son was in trouble. It
was Lott sayin’ that, I know it sure as I know I’m standing here.” Grandpa’s
eyes would shine a bit, then he’d say, “Only thing is, Lott had been dead near
ten years.”
This part of the story called for reverence. Mother and Grandma both loved
to tell it but I liked Mother’s telling best. Her voice hushed in the right places.
It was angels, she would say, a small tear falling to the corner of her smile.
Your great-grandpa Lott sent them, and they carried Grandpa down the
mountain.
The dent was unsightly, a two-inch crater in his forehead. As a child, when
I looked at it, sometimes I imagined a tall doctor in a white coat banging on a
sheet of metal with a hammer. In my imagination the doctor used the same
corrugated sheets of tin that Dad used to roof hay sheds.
But that was only sometimes. Usually I saw something else. Proof that my
ancestors walked that peak, watching and waiting, angels at their command.
I don’t know why Dad was alone on the mountain that day.
The car crusher was coming. I suppose he wanted to remove that last fuel
tank, but I can’t imagine what possessed him to light his torch without first
draining the fuel. I don’t know how far he got, how many of the iron belts he
managed to sever, before a spark from the torch made it into the tank. But I