or a levee. I felt tossed about, unable to hold myself in place. I screamed but the screams were strangled; I was drowning. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment, and even if I could the only apartments for rent were in town. Then I’d need a car. I had only eight hundred dollars. I sputtered all this at Mother, then ran to my room and slammed the door.
She knocked moments later. “I know you think we’re being unfair,” she said, “but when I was your age I was living on my own, getting ready to marry your father.”
“You were married at sixteen?” I said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You are not sixteen.”
I stared at her. She stared at me. “Yes, I am. I’m sixteen.”
She looked me over. “You’re at least twenty.” She cocked her head. “Aren’t you?”
We were silent. My heart pounded in my chest. “I turned sixteen in September,” I said.
“Oh.” Mother bit her lip, then she stood and smiled. “Well, don’t worry about it then. You can stay. Don’t know what your dad was thinking, really. I guess we forgot. Hard to keep track of how old you kids are.”
* * *
—
SHAWN RETURNED TO WORK, hobbling unsteadily. He wore an Aussie outback hat, which was large, wide-brimmed, and made of chocolate-brown oiled leather. Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was disrespectful. Disrespecting Dad might have been the reason Shawn wore it, but I suspect another reason was that it was large and comfortable and covered the scars from his surgery.
He worked short days at first. Dad had a contract to build a milking barn in Oneida County, about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak, so Shawn puttered around the yard, adjusting schematics and measuring I-beams.
Luke, Benjamin and I were scrapping. Dad had decided it was time to salvage the angle iron stacked all around the farm. To be sold, each piece had to measure less than four feet. Shawn suggested we use torches to cut the iron, but Dad said it would be too slow and cost too much in fuel.
A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. They bit down, their great jaws propelled by a heavy piston attached to a large iron wheel. The wheel was animated by a belt and motor, which meant that if something got caught in the machine, it would take anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute to stop the wheel and halt the blades. Up and down they roared, louder than a passing train as they chewed through iron as thick as a man’s arm. The iron wasn’t being cut so much as snapped. Sometimes it would buck, propelling whoever was holding it toward the dull, chomping blades.
Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off.
Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured.
Shawn lurched back to the shop, shaking his head. Dad began feeding iron through the Shear. Each length bucked him forward and twice he nearly pitched headfirst into the blades. I jammed my eyes shut, knowing that if Dad’s head got caught, the blades wouldn’t even slow, just hack through his neck and keep chomping.
Now that he was sure the machine worked, Dad motioned for Luke to take over, and Luke, ever eager to please, stepped forward. Five minutes later Luke’s arm was gashed to the bone and he was running toward the house, blood spurting.
Dad scanned his crew. He motioned to Benjamin, but Benjamin shook his head, saying he liked