Sound Of Gravel, The (32 page)
”Shocked?”
I had no idea what he was talking about and wasn’t sure that he did. But as soon I heard the word, I broke into a sprint down the driveway, with pebbles and spiky weeds poking the soft soles of my feet. I ran the fifty yards to the driveway’s edge where the ditch ran parallel to the barbed-wire fence and the road. I jumped over the ditch, and clods of earth crumbled into the water under my footsteps. I rushed through the open gate and turned right onto the road toward the tumbleweeds. I ran another fifty yards, my pulse pounding in my throat.
Panicking now, I ran, scanning the ditch and the land beyond the fence, but I saw only fields and trees and giant, dry tumbleweeds. But then I smelled something strange, a burning, pungent odor. My legs went weak and I tripped over them, hurrying to the tumbleweeds, so thick with brambles that I didn’t see the boys until I was a few feet away.
Micah! His muddy, wet body hung motionless from the barbed-wire fence. His eyes and mouth were wide-open, his head and neck arched as if he’d thrown them back in laughter. His chest, shorts, and pale legs were stuck fast to the fence. Both hands grasped the middle wire as if he’d been trying to pull himself through it when suddenly he’d been frozen in position. One foot was off the ground midstep, dirty and dangling. His other foot was planted on something shiny and silver in the dirt, a piece of metal, the tip of an electrical wire.
I was frozen and couldn’t look away. It was my little brother Micah, but drained of his glow, his softness, his tears, and his stutter. I didn’t understand what was happening.
Was he still alive?
And there not two feet away was … Junior.
He was stuck against the very same fence.
His body was hanging too, as if propelled onto the fence or sucked onto it. His eyes were open and both hands clutched the barbed wire exactly like Micah’s. Both boys—electrocuted.
I fell to the ground heaving, my arms folded across my stomach. “Mom,” I gasped. “Mom!” I staggered up to pull Micah from the fence and then stopped. I leaned in first to look more closely at his freckled face and his chapped lips to see if he was still breathing. I lifted a finger to touch his forehead, felt a violent jolt, and fell backward.
I looked in the direction of the house, and the distance seemed incredible. “Mom!” I yelled. “Mom … help me!” I needed to scream the loudest I’d ever screamed, yet my voice seemed caught deep inside me. I jumped up, and when I did, I suddenly felt my energy return.
“Mom, help me! I think Micah is
dead
!”
I watched for a few seconds but the kitchen door did not open. I searched both sides of the road for something, a stick or a piece of wood that might help me free Micah from the wires. I turned back toward home.
“Mom—”
I wanted to turn off the electricity, but that meant running all the way to Lane’s shop on the other side of the house. It was more than a football field away, and I couldn’t risk leaving the boys on the fence that long.
Mom will know what to do,
I thought.
Suddenly, the kitchen door burst open. Mom came running down the driveway, Alex, Elena, and Leah trailing behind. My mother leaped over the ditch, stumbling when she landed, causing her glasses to pop off the bridge of her nose and fall somewhere in the wet earth below her. She looked down briefly but couldn’t see them and continued running. Closer and closer she ran in awkward footsteps, her eyes squinting as if she couldn’t exactly see where I was. I ran to meet her, and when she reached me, she stood with her face directly in front of me to see me clearly.
“What is it?! What’s happened?!” she shrieked.
“Mom.” I looked straight into her tired, squinting eyes. “Mom. Micah’s electrocuted on the fence. I think he’s dead.”
Her lips quivered as she sucked in a breath. “What do you mean? This fence doesn’t have electricity running through it. Where is he?” She looked past my shoulder and searched the length of the fence but couldn’t see the boys behind the cluster of tumbleweeds. Alex, Elena, and Leah were still running to try to catch up. I was afraid they’d fall into the fence or touch it. “Don’t touch the fence!” I yelled, then turned to Mom, who had hurried past me. “Mom, don’t touch the fence.”
Leah, ever defiant, lifted her index finger and started to reach for the bottom wire. I hurried toward her and scooped her up, grabbed Elena’s hand, and took Alex and my sisters to the other side of the road. “Why can’t we touch the fence?” Elena whined. I turned to try to help Mom, who looked completely disoriented without her glasses and was wandering down the edge of the road. She still hadn’t reached the other side of the cluster and couldn’t see my brother.
“Where’s my son? Micah?” she called in the most painful voice. “Micah? Where are you, Micah?” He was just inches from her and still she couldn’t see him.
She approached the tumbleweed quickly but awkwardly. I took a deep breath and hurried to the other side of the road toward her. “Mom, don’t touch the fence,” I warned. Just as I said it, she lost her footing where the road’s shoulder dipped down into a muddy pothole and tilted toward the fence. As if to steady her body and keep herself from falling, she reached for its top wire with both hands.
“Mom! No!”
I screamed.
I raised my arms to grab for her but only caught the air. In a moment, her body collapsed forward onto the barbed wire, then went completely silent and still.
“Mom, wait!”
I yelled, as if there were still time to warn her. I ran up behind her, sucked in the dry air, and waited a second to see if she might respond. But then I saw her head was tilted forward, her forehead impaled on a barb, her eyes wide-open.
Save her,
said a voice inside me, and a second later I knew what to do. The tail of Mom’s blouse hung untucked from her polyester slacks. I touched it lightly and felt no shock, so I grabbed the tail with both hands and pulled. Her body did not budge; the electrical current was holding her to the fence. I gripped her shirttail tighter, planted my back foot, and pulled again. But Mom still didn’t move. I grabbed it one more time, this time pulling so hard the seams of her blouse ripped all the way up to the armpits, and finally I felt her body move. With one more tug she fell back against my left shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her to hold her up, but didn’t have the strength. She fell backward out of my arms and her head slammed into the middle of the dirt road.
I knelt beside Mom’s limp body. Jagged streaks of blood from the wound on her forehead coursed down the right side of her face and into her hair. Her eyes were open, and I could see just a sliver of her hazel irises at the top of her lids as her eyes rolled upward. A moan erupted from deep within her—she was still breathing. Suddenly, two pairs of little-girl shoes appeared next to Mom’s head. I looked up. Elena and Leah stood there, shaking, horrified and confused.
“You girls go back inside the house. Now!” I jumped to my feet and reached for Alex, who was standing in front of the boys’ bodies, staring at his brothers. “Take the girls back to the house so they don’t touch the fence! And check on the baby!”
The children ran to the house, and I turned my attention back to Mom. The moaning continued. I needed to get her to a hospital. I scanned the horizon. There were trees and alfalfa fields, a few houses in the distance, and beyond that, only the mountains. I needed a telephone to call an ambulance. Then I realized, in rapid succession, that the nearest telephone was a mile away, that even if I’d had one, no ambulance would come because there was no ambulance, and that even if there had been one, it would have had to drive forty miles to reach the nearest hospital.
We were stranded. There was nothing I could do and no one was around. I jumped up and down in the middle of the road—it was all I could do—and waved my arms screaming wildly.
I knelt beside Mom again, my throat sore from shouting. I leaned over, put my ear to her mouth, and felt a warm, shallow breath, so I decided to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I put my mouth over her open lips, pinched her nose closed, and forced my breath into her. But all I’d learned about CPR had come from movies, and I soon gave up, fearing I was doing more harm than good.
I jumped up, screamed again, and immediately heard the distant sound of a motor and tires over gravel. A white pickup suddenly appeared up the road. Heeding my call, it sped up, leaving huge dust clouds in its wake. It screeched to a halt right in front of us, and two Mexican men jumped out of the cab.
“Ayuda mi mamá,”
I pleaded in my broken Spanish,
“y mis hermanitos.”
I saw the men look over to the boys suspended from the fence. They gasped, their hands involuntarily flying to their mouths. “
She’s
still alive, though,” I called out, bringing their attention back to Mom. One of the men approached her, touched her forehead, and lifted her chin. He took off his hat and leaned his ear in close to her mouth and then scanned her body as if giving her a checkup. Looking over his shoulder at his companion, he said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. The other man rushed around the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. Together, they carried Mom to the truck and gently laid her in the cab, her head dangling to one side, her mouth and eyes now wide-open.
One man got behind the wheel, and I jumped into the passenger’s side, lifted Mom’s head, and rested it on my lap. Before the second man could get in, I slammed the door shut, rolled the window down and told him that little children were in the house. I asked if he could stay. He nodded yes and then darted toward the house.
As the truck sped forward, I heard my voice screaming out the window at anyone who might hear me,
“Micah and Junior are dead! Don’t touch the fence!”
I sucked the summer air into my lungs in giant gulps while I prayed and cried. The truck shook violently as it bounded over the dirt road toward the highway. The wind stung my eyes, forcing me to close them, and when they opened again, I noticed we were approaching Susan’s driveway. In it a car was parked with its hood up, covering my stepfather’s head as he bent forward underneath it.
“Para! Para!”
I yelled. A quiet moan came from Mom’s throat, and I opened the door before the truck had even stopped. My knees immediately buckled underneath me and my body hit the dirt road. “Lane, help me!” I cried, and pushed myself back to my feet. His head shot up from under the hood, his face stunned and confused. I rushed to him, sobbing. “Lane, my mom was shocked. I think she’s dying!”
He looked at me a half second, dropped his tools to the ground, and without saying a word ran past me to the truck. I saw Mom’s messy brown hair as Lane lifted her head onto his lap and slammed the door. The driver sped away, and the tailgate disappeared into a cloud of dust as the truck rushed toward the paved highway. Within seconds, it was heading south.
I fell to my knees once more, alone and shaking in the road. A wooden screen door opened and then slammed behind me, and I looked up to see Susan and her youngest son running toward me. I was surprised to see Aaron following close behind.
“Micah and Junior are dead,” I said, feeling shocked and disoriented, standing straight up without even looking at them. Aaron cried out and began running toward the house.
“Aaron!” Susan yelled. “You kids wait here until we find out what’s really going on.” He stopped, turned around, and ran back to us, panting. Susan grabbed my shoulders to keep me from falling again.
“We need to get back to the house.
We need to turn off the electricity!”
I screamed. “Micah is dead! He’s still stuck to the fence! We have to turn the power off!”
“Come on now,” Susan said calmly, patting me on the back as if I were crazy. For some reason I’ve never understood, her first instinct was to think I was delusional. “You must be confused. Now tell me what happened.” I broke away from her and walked ahead up the road toward home, Susan trailing behind. A moment later a speeding car hammered on its brakes.
“I heard someone screaming. Is everything okay?” asked a woman, one of Lane’s sisters I didn’t know well.
“Apparently, there’s been some kind of accident with the electricity at Kathy’s house,” Susan explained as she and I got into the four-door sedan. I asked Lane’s sister to take us to the far corner of our property where her brother’s shop was. We seemed to arrive within seconds. Susan and I jumped out of the car, ran into the shop’s dark and dilapidated interior, and pulled the light string above our heads. “Show me where it is,” Susan said, still calm.
We made our way through the minefield of scattered tractor and car parts, as well as Lane’s multitude of half-finished, abandoned projects, until we’d reached a metal box on the wall in a far corner. Susan wiped away spiderwebs and dust with a freckled hand, opened the box, and flipped the switch I’d pointed to. The shop light went off, and an image flashed through my head, that of two boys plunging to the ground. I doubled over with grief.
“Come on, Ruthie,” said Susan gently as she ushered me out of the shop. “Let’s go find Micah and Junior. They’re okay, Ruthie.”
“Micah’s dead,” I mumbled over and over. “I saw him on the fence.”
“You listen to me, Ruthie.” Susan put her hands on my shoulders, stopping me. “Look at me!” she commanded. “Micah … is
not dead
. Now settle yourself down. Your mom will be back from the hospital soon.”
We walked together in silence toward the spot where I’d last seen the boys. A green truck was now parked there. The late-morning sun blinded me as we crossed the shallow end of the ditch, but as Susan and I approached the tumbleweeds on the fence, I could see two men standing there, staring at something on the ground.
One of them looked up at us and shook his head. “Don’t bring her over here,” his deep voice warned. Susan grabbed my wrist, pulling me back. Micah’s and Junior’s lifeless arms jutted out from behind the tumbleweed, and Susan gasped. She stood there winded for a moment, then gripped my shirt tightly, pulled me around, and began walking me back to the house.