father. I know that when Mother had removed the gauze that morning,
she’d found that his ears were so burned, the skin so glutinous, they
had fused to the syrupy tissue behind them. When I walked through
the back door, the first thing I saw was Mother grasping a butter knife,
which she was using to pry my father’s ears from his skull. I can still
picture her gripping the knife, her eyes fixed, focused, but where my
father should be, there’s an aperture in my memory.
The smell in the room was powerful—of charred flesh, and of
comfrey, mullein and plantain. I watched Mother and Audrey change
his remaining bandages. They began with his hands. His fingers were
slimy, coated in a pale ooze that was either melted skin or pus. His
arms were not burned and neither were his shoulders or back, but a
thick swath of gauze ran over his stomach and chest. When they
removed it, I was pleased to see large patches of raw, angry skin. There
were a few craters from where the flames must have concentrated in
jets. They gave off a pungent smell, like meat gone to rot, and were
filled with white pools.
But it was his face that visited my dreams that night. He still had a
forehead and nose. The skin around his eyes and partway down his
cheeks was pink and healthy. But below his nose, nothing was where it
should be. Red, mangled, sagging, it looked like a plastic drama mask
that had been held too close to a candle.
Dad hadn’t swallowed anything—no food, no water—for nearly three
days. Mother called a hospital in Utah and begged them to give her an
IV. “I need to hydrate him,” she said. “He’ll die if he doesn’t get water.”
The doctor said he would send a chopper that very minute but
Mother said no. “Then I can’t help you,” the doctor said. “You’re going
to kill him, and I want no part of it.”
Mother was beside herself. In a final, desperate act, she gave Dad an
enema, pushing the tube in as far as she dared, trying to flush enough
liquid through his rectum to keep him alive. She had no idea if it would
work—if there was even an organ in that part of the body to absorb the
water—but it was the only orifice that hadn’t been scorched.
I slept on the living room floor that night so I could be there, in the
room, when we lost him. I awoke several times to gasps and flights of
movements and murmurs that it had happened again, he’d stopped
breathing.