tank, but I can’t imagine what possessed him to light his torch without first draining the fuel. I don’t know how far he got, how many of the iron belts he managed to sever, before a spark from the torch made it into the tank. But I know Dad was standing next to the car, his body pressed against the frame, when the tank exploded.
He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, leather gloves and a welding shield. His face and fingers took the brunt of the blast. The heat from the explosion melted through the shield as if it were a plastic spoon. The lower half of his face liquefied: the fire consumed plastic, then skin, then muscle. The same process was repeated with his fingers—the leather gloves were no match for the inferno that passed over and through them—then tongues of flame licked across his shoulders and chest. When he crawled away from the flaming wreckage, I imagine he looked more like a corpse than a living man.
It is unfathomable to me that he was able to move, let alone drag himself a quarter mile through fields and over ditches. If ever a man needed angels, it was that man. But against all reason he did it, and—as his father had years before—huddled outside his wife’s door, unable to knock.
My cousin Kylie was working for my mother that day, filling vials of essential oil. A few other women worked nearby, weighing dried leaves or straining tinctures. Kylie heard a soft tap on the back door, as if someone was bumping it with their elbow. She opened it but has no memory of what was on the other side. “I’ve blocked it out,” she would later tell me. “I can’t remember what I saw. I only remember what I thought, which was, He has no skin.”
My father was carried to the couch. Rescue Remedy—the homeopathic for shock—was poured into the lipless cavity that had been his mouth. They gave him lobelia and skullcap for the pain, the same mixture Mother had given Luke years before. Dad choked on the medicine. He couldn’t swallow. He’d inhaled the fiery blast, and his insides were charred.
Mother tried to take him to the hospital, but between rasping breaths he whispered that he’d rather die than see a doctor. The authority of the man was such that she gave way.
The dead skin was gently cut away and he was slathered in salve—the same salve Mother had used on Luke’s leg years before—from his waist to the tip of his head, then bandaged. Mother gave him ice cubes to suck on, hoping to hydrate him, but the inside of his mouth and throat were so badly burned, they absorbed no liquid, and without lips or muscles he couldn’t hold the ice in his mouth. It would slide down his throat and choke him.
They nearly lost him many times that first night. His breathing would slow, then stop, and my mother—and the heavenly host of women who worked for her—would fly about, adjusting chakras and tapping pressure points, anything to coax his brittle lungs to resume their rattle.
That morning was when Audrey called me.* His heart had stopped twice during the night, she told me. It would probably be his heart that killed him, assuming his lungs didn’t give out first. Either way, Audrey was sure he’d be dead by midday.
I called Nick. I told him I had to go to Idaho for a few days, for a family thing, nothing serious. He knew I wasn’t telling him something—I could hear the hurt in his voice that I wouldn’t confide in him—but I put him out of my mind the moment I hung up the phone.
I stood, keys in hand, hand on the doorknob, and hesitated. The strep. What if I gave it to Dad? I had been taking the penicillin for nearly three days. The doctor had said that after twenty-four hours I would no longer be contagious, but then he was a doctor, and I didn’t trust him.
I waited a day. I took several times the prescribed dose of penicillin, then called Mother and asked what I should do.
“You should come home,” she said, and her voice broke. “I don’t think the strep will matter tomorrow.”
I don’t recall the scenery from the drive. My eyes barely registered the patchwork of corn and potato fields, or the dark hills covered in pine. Instead I saw my father, the way he’d looked the last time I’d seen him,