Educated: Chapters 4–8

When Dad wasn’t around, I’d heard her say things that he—or at least this new incarnation of him—would have called sacrilege, things like, “Herbs are supplements. For something serious, you should go to a doctor.”

Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision.

I’d seen hundreds of shattered windshields in the junkyard, each one unique, with its particular spray of gossamer extruding from the point of impact, a chronicle of the collision.

Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid.

Dad had begun to expound a scripture when Tyler cleared his throat and said he was leaving.

Everyone looked at Dad. His expression was folded, impassive. The silence was worse than shouting.

Grandma was even worse, Dad said. She was frivolous.

Muscle testing, she explained to me, was a kind of prayer, a divine supplication.

Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!”

There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me.

While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.

In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me.

Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe.

The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first was the belt.

There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati.