Educated

hand. He was right; it was not as heavy as it looked. Next Dad handed me a
dented pipe. “This here’s steel,” he said.
We began to sort the debris into piles—aluminum, iron, steel, copper—so
it could be sold. I picked up a piece of iron. It was dense with bronze rust,
and its jagged angles nibbled at my palms. I had a pair of leather gloves, but
when Dad saw them he said they’d slow me down. “You’ll get calluses real
quick,” he promised as I handed them over. I’d found a hard hat in the shop,
but Dad took that, too. “You’ll move slower trying to balance this silly thing
on your head,” he said.
Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the
worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious
way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of
scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and
deliver it. Every slab of iron, every ring of copper tubing was a nickel, a
dime, a dollar—less if it took more than two seconds to extract and classify—
and he constantly weighed these meager profits against the hourly expense of
running the house. He figured that to keep the lights on, the house warm, he
needed to work at breakneck speed. I never saw Dad carry anything to a
sorting bin; he just chucked it, with all the strength he had, from wherever he
was standing.
The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was an accident, a mishap that
would be corrected. I hadn’t yet grasped the rules of this new world. I had
bent down, and was reaching for a copper coil, when something massive cut
through the air next to me. When I turned to see where it had come from, I
caught a steel cylinder full in the stomach.
The impact knocked me to the ground. “Oops!” Dad hollered. I rolled over
on the ice, winded. By the time I’d scrambled to my feet, Dad had launched
something else. I ducked but lost my footing and fell. This time I stayed
down. I was shaking but not from cold. My skin was alive and tingling with
the certainty of danger, yet when I looked for the source of that danger, all I
could see was a tired old man, tugging on a broken light fixture.
I remembered all the times I’d seen one of my brothers burst through the
back door, howling, pinching some part of his body that was gashed or
squashed or broken or burned. I remembered two years before, when a man
named Robert, who worked for Dad, had lost a finger. I remembered the
otherworldly pitch of his scream as he ran to the house. I remembered staring
at the bloody stump, and then at the severed finger, which Luke brought in