7
The Lord Will Provide
It was a rainless summer. The sun blazed across the sky each afternoon,
scorching the mountain with its arid, desiccating heat, so that each morning
when I crossed the field to the barn, I felt stalks of wild wheat crackle and
break beneath my feet.
I spent an amber morning making the Rescue Remedy homeopathic for
Mother. I would take fifteen drops from the base formula—which was kept in
Mother’s sewing cupboard, where it would not be used or polluted—and add
them to a small bottle of distilled water. Then I would make a circle with my
index finger and my thumb, and push the bottle through the circle. The
strength of the homeopathic, Mother said, depended on how many passes the
bottle made through my fingers, how many times it drew on my energy.
Usually I stopped at fifty.
Dad and Luke were on the mountain, in the junkyard above the upper
pasture, a quarter mile from the house. They were preparing cars for the
crusher, which Dad had hired for later that week. Luke was seventeen. He
had a lean, muscular build and, when outdoors, an easy smile. Luke and Dad
were draining gasoline from the tanks. The crusher won’t take a car with the
fuel tank attached, because there’s a risk of explosion, so every tank had to be
drained and removed. It was slow work, puncturing the tank with a hammer
and stake, then waiting for the fuel to drip out so the tank could be safely
removed with a cutting torch. Dad had devised a shortcut: an enormous
skewer, eight feet tall, of thick iron. Dad would lift a car with the forklift, and
Luke would guide him until the car’s tank was suspended directly over the
spike. Then Dad would drop the forks. If all went well, the car would be
impaled on the spike and gasoline would gush from the tank, streaming down
the spike and into the flat-bottom container Dad had welded in place to
collect it.