Educated

The story of how Tyler decided to leave the mountain is a strange one, full of
gaps and twists. It begins with Tyler himself, with the bizarre fact of him. It
happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is
off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He
was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous
music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.
Tyler liked books, he liked quiet. He liked organizing and arranging and
labeling. Once, Mother found a whole shelf of matchboxes in his closet,
stacked by year. Tyler said they contained his pencil shavings from the past
five years, which he had collected to make fire starters for our “head for the
hills” bags. The rest of the house was pure confusion: piles of unwashed
laundry, oily and black from the junkyard, littered the bedroom floors; in the
kitchen, murky jars of tincture lined every table and cabinet, and these were
only cleared away to make space for even messier projects, perhaps to skin a
deer carcass or strip Cosmoline off a rifle. But in the heart of this chaos,
Tyler had half a decade’s pencil shavings, cataloged by year.
My brothers were like a pack of wolves. They tested each other constantly,
with scuffles breaking out every time some young pup hit a growth spurt and
dreamed of moving up. When I was young these tussles usually ended with
Mother screaming over a broken lamp or vase, but as I got older there were
fewer things left to break. Mother said we’d owned a TV once, when I was a
baby, until Shawn had put Tyler’s head through it.
While his brothers wrestled, Tyler listened to music. He owned the only
boom box I had ever seen, and next to it he kept a tall stack of CDs with
strange words on them, like “Mozart” and “Chopin.” One Sunday afternoon,
when he was perhaps sixteen, he caught me looking at them. I tried to run,
because I thought he might wallop me for being in his room, but instead he
took my hand and led me to the stack. “W-which one do y-you like best?” he
said.
One was black, with a hundred men and women dressed in white on the
cover. I pointed to it. Tyler eyed me skeptically. “Th-th-this is ch-ch-choir
music,” he said.
He slipped the disc into the black box, then sat at his desk to read. I
squatted on the floor by his feet, scratching designs into the carpet. The music
began: a breath of strings, then a whisper of voices, chanting, soft as silk, but
somehow piercing. The hymn was familiar to me—we’d sung it at church, a
chorus of mismatched voices raised in worship—but this was different. It was