NOW
Most people believe memory is like a video recording. It captures a moment and holds it unchanged. However, I think memory is more like that software that allows you to put one person’s head on another person’s body in a photograph or splice someone into a video. It can be manipulated. It can be distorted. It can even be locked in a hidden recess of the mind.
The sight of Angela at the bottom of the spike pit, her mouth agape and a stake through her throat, was the key for me. The violence of her death made me stagger backward and lean against a tree, and that was when the memory hit. I was back in the cold in the barn. Only this time my mother stood alive in front of me.
She was dressed in jeans and one of my sweatshirts. Her lips were painted bright red as if she were going to church or town, and yet she carried our sledgehammer in one hand. She was saying something about hearing me come home.
“You’re waiting for him, aren’t you?” she said.
I remembered how confused I was because of the beers I’d drunk, and asking her, “Waiting for who?”
“Waiting for your father to come running,” she said. “I heard about you. I heard about how you’ve slept with every boy in that school of yours.”
Her brittle hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
“No, only Matt,” I said, suddenly realizing through the beer sludge in my brain that I’d just admitted a secret I’d be punished for.
In the memory, my mother said, “I saw you,” and took a step toward me. I think I took a step back. “I saw you prancing around in your underwear like that. Flaunting yourself,” she said.
I told her I had never pranced around in my underwear.
She swung the sledgehammer onto her shoulder and said, “Coming out of the shower like that. You knew your father would be watching. You think I don’t know what you and your father are doing? You’re screwing him, aren’t you?”
I remembered how the meaning behind her words tried to take shape but wouldn’t form.
“You knew your father is a weak man, so it was easy to seduce him, wasn’t it?” She trembled with anger. “I’ve seen you sneaking off with him.”
“What’s wrong with you?” I cried. “Are you psycho or something?”
“I know what I saw.”
“That’s sick,” I told her, “and so are you. Oh my God, how could you think that?”
She called me a whore and, with two hands, raised the sledgehammer and swung it at me.
My mother was a strong woman. Ranch women usually are. I remembered scrambling backward and the smack of the tool’s heavy head smashing into the barn’s concrete floor.
“Corrine saw you at the clinic,” my mother spit. “You and your father trying to hide the evidence.” She hefted the sledgehammer and swung at my head again.
I backed up. “Mom, stop,” I yelled.
In my memory, I could feel my back against the barn wall. The only way to escape was to climb into the high stack of hay. That wouldn’t stop her from following me, however. I half remembered grabbing the hayfork but I could clearly see her lifting the sledgehammer again and me jabbing the hayfork at her and saying, “Stop it. Get back.”
I’ll never know if my mother saw the hayfork. What I do know now is that my mother charged and that the force of her running pushed the handle of the hayfork against the barn wall so the tines plunged deeply into her abdomen. Deeper than I could have thrust them on my own.
In my memory, I saw her drop the sledgehammer, stare at the sharp tines embedded in her flesh, stumble backward and fall.
I had screamed until my father found me.
He’d led me into the house and said he would take care of everything.
The only thing he’d missed, apparently, was my hair clip, which my mother must have used to hold her ponytail in place, and I realized, leaning against that tree in the snowstorm, that my father’s silence had been intended to save me, not to sentence me. That he’d loved me enough to sacrifice his own life for mine. That he’d died protecting me. I thought of how he’d gone after the rattlesnake so viciously, not because he was angry with my mom but because he was keeping me safe, guarding me from harm. Sorrow flooded me but so did a kind of peace, a recognition of what had been lost but also what I’d been to him.
My throat closed and I wiped my eyes. I turned and headed for the cabin.