I began the ascent. There was a pasture to my left, a ditch to my right. As the incline began in earnest I saw three cars pulled off near the ditch. The doors were open, the cab lights on. Seven or eight people huddled around something on the gravel. I changed lanes to drive around them, but stopped when I saw a small object lying in the middle of the highway.
It was a wide-brimmed Aussie hat.
I pulled over and ran toward the people clustered by the ditch. “Shawn!” I shouted.
The crowd parted to let me through. Shawn was facedown on the gravel, lying in a pool of blood that looked pink in the glare from the headlights. He wasn’t moving. “He hit a cow coming around the corner,” a man said. “It’s so dark tonight, he didn’t even see it. We’ve called an ambulance. We don’t dare move him.”
Shawn’s body was contorted, his back twisted. I had no idea how long an ambulance might take, and there was so much blood. I decided to stop the bleeding. I dug my hands under his shoulder and heaved but I couldn’t lift him. I looked up at the crowd and recognized a face. Dwain.* He was one of us. Mother had midwifed four of his eight children.
“Dwain! Help me turn him.”
Dwain hefted Shawn onto his back. For a second that contained an hour, I stared at my brother, watching the blood trickle out of his temple and down his right cheek, pouring over his ear and onto his white T-shirt. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. The blood was oozing from a hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead. It looked as though his temple had been dragged on the asphalt, scraping away skin, then bone. I leaned close and peered inside the wound. Something soft and spongy glistened back at me. I slipped out of my jacket and pressed it to Shawn’s head.
When I touched the abrasion, Shawn released a long sigh and his eyes opened.
“Sidlister,” he mumbled. Then he seemed to lose consciousness.
My cellphone was in my pocket. I dialed. Dad answered.
I must have been frantic, sputtering. I said Shawn had crashed his bike, that he had a hole in his head.
“Slow down. What happened?”
I said it all a second time. “What should I do?”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother will deal with it.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. Finally, I said, “I’m not joking. His brain, I can see it!”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother can handle it.” Then: the dull drone of a dial tone. He’d hung up.
Dwain had overheard. “I live just through this field,” he said. “Your mother can treat him there.”
“No,” I said. “Dad wants him home. Help me get him in the car.”
Shawn groaned when we lifted him but he didn’t speak again. Someone said we should wait for the ambulance. Someone else said we should drive him to the hospital ourselves. I don’t think anyone believed we would take him home, not with his brain dribbling out of his forehead.
We folded Shawn into the backseat. I got behind the wheel, and Dwain climbed in on the passenger side. I checked my rearview mirror to pull onto the highway, then reached up and shoved the mirror downward so it reflected Shawn’s face, blank and bloodied. My foot hovered over the gas.
Three seconds passed, maybe four. That’s all it was.
Dwain was shouting, “Let’s go!” but I barely heard him. I was lost to panic. My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that, five minutes before, I had needed to believe.
I had never thought about the day Shawn had fallen from the pallet. There was nothing to think about. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall; there was no deeper meaning in it than that. I had never imagined what it would have been like to be there. To see Shawn plunge, grasping at air. To watch him collide, then fold, then lie still. I had never allowed myself to imagine what happened after—Dad’s decision to leave him by the pickup, or the worried looks that must have passed between Luke and Benjamin.
Now, staring at the creases in my brother’s face, each a little river of blood, I remembered. I remembered that Shawn had sat by the pickup for a quarter of an hour, his brain bleeding. Then he’d had that fit and the boys had wrestled him to the ground, so that he’d fallen, sustained a second injury, the injury the doctors said should have killed him. It was the reason Shawn would never quite be Shawn again.
If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?
* * *
—
I’D NEVER BEEN TO the hospital in town, but it was easy to find.