I didn’t understand. He wanted to dump the bin with me in it? “I’ll climb up after you’ve dumped the load,” I said.
“No, this’ll be faster,” Dad said. “I’ll pause when the bin’s level with the trailer wall so you can climb out. Then you can run along the wall and perch on top of the cab until the dump is finished.”
I settled myself on a length of iron. Dad jammed the forks under the bin, then lifted me and the scrap and began driving, full throttle, toward the trailer’s head. I could barely hold on. On the last turn, the bucket swung with such force that a spike of iron was flung toward me. It pierced the inside of my leg, an inch below my knee, sliding into the tissue like a knife into warm butter. I tried to pull it out but the load had shifted, and it was partially buried. I heard the soft groaning of hydraulic pumps as the boom extended. The groaning stopped when the bin was level with the trailer. Dad was giving me time to climb onto the trailer wall but I was pinned. “I’m stuck!” I shouted, only the growl of the loader’s engine was too loud. I wondered if Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely on the semi’s cab, but even as I wondered I knew he wouldn’t. Time was still stalking.
The hydraulics groaned and the bin raised another eight feet. Dumping position. I shouted again, higher this time, then lower, trying to find a pitch that would pierce through the drone of the engine. The bin began its tilt, slowly at first, then quickly. I was pinned near the back. I wrapped my hands around the bin’s top wall, knowing this would give me a ledge to grasp when the bin was vertical. As the bin continued to pitch, the scrap at the front began to slide forward, bit by bit, a great iron glacier breaking apart. The spike was still embedded in my leg, dragging me downward. My grip had slipped and I’d begun to slide when the spike finally ripped from me and fell away, smashing into the trailer with a tremendous crash. I was now free, but falling. I flailed my arms, willing them to seize something that wasn’t plunging downward. My palm caught hold of the bin’s side wall, which was now nearly vertical. I pulled myself toward it and hoisted my body over its edge, then continued my fall. Because I was now falling from the side of the bin and not the front, I hoped—I prayed—that I was falling toward the ground and not toward the trailer, which was at that moment a fury of grinding metal. I sank, seeing only blue sky, waiting to feel either the stab of sharp iron or the jolt of solid earth.
My back struck iron: the trailer’s wall. My feet snapped over my head and I continued my graceless plunge to the ground. The first fall was seven or eight feet, the second perhaps ten. I was relieved to taste dirt.
I lay on my back for perhaps fifteen seconds before the engine growled to silence and I heard Dad’s heavy step.
“What happened?” he said, kneeling next to me.
“I fell out,” I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and there was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if I’d been cut in two.
“How’d you manage that?” Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought. It’s a simple thing.
Dad examined the gash in my leg, which had been ripped wide as the spike had fallen away. It looked like a pothole; the tissue had simply sunk out of sight. Dad slipped out of his flannel shirt and pressed it to my leg. “Go on home,” he said. “Mother will stop the bleeding.”
I limped through the pasture until Dad was out of sight, then collapsed in the tall wheatgrass. I was shaking, gulping mouthfuls of air that never made it to my lungs. I didn’t understand why I was crying. I was alive. I would be fine. The angels had done their part. So why couldn’t I stop trembling?
I was light-headed when I crossed the last field and approached the house, but I burst through the back door, as I’d seen my brothers do, as Robert and Emma had done, shouting for Mother. When she saw the crimson footprints streaked across the linoleum, she fetched the homeopathic she used to treat hemorrhages and shock, called Rescue Remedy, and put twelve drops of the clear, tasteless liquid under my tongue. She rested her left hand lightly on the gash and crossed the fingers of her right. Her eyes closed. Click click click. “There’s no tetanus,” she said. “The wound will close. Eventually. But it’ll leave a nasty scar.”
She turned me onto my stomach and examined the bruise—a patch of deep purple the size of a human head—that had formed a few inches above my hip. Again her fingers crossed and her eyes closed. Click click click.