We couldn’t reach him through the tree’s sharp, tangled limbs, no matter how Esther yelled his name, no matter how hard my mother worked to break the smaller branches, her hands torn up from trying. But we all, together, finally managed to pull some of it off him, and then I bent away the thinnest branches until they bowed, taut and difficult, in my arms while my mother and Esther tugged him away inches at a time, Samuel crying “Daddy!” again and again but too small for anything else, my mother reaching through the branches, feeling my father’s neck, feeling for his pulse, finding it, and then with a mighty surge pulling him from the last of the tangle and onto open ground, to turn him over and call his name, holding his face in her hands, the blood matting his hair, his skin a shocking white, all of us calling him, my sister holding one of his hands in both of hers, Samuel tugging on the hem of his pant leg, my mother kneeling alongside him, then scrambling to her feet, looking wildly around, her hands dripping with blood, and then running for an old blanket that we made into a hammock to drag him, his poor body bumping along the frozen ground, and then slowly, horribly, up onto the cabin’s step and through its door and across the floor, into the washroom, laying him near the drain and pouring warm water over his wound to clean it, waiting for him to wake up.

I will never forget the moment when we all stopped and sat back, exhausted, and looked at each other, at him, at the pink water trailing from his head, all of us breathing hard, Samuel still crying, crawling into my mother’s lap, his face red and snotty and swollen.

“Run to the Petersons’, Ellie,” my mother said, her voice shaking. “Tell them to fetch the doctor. Tell them to hurry.”

Chapter Fourteen

It was only days later, after the doctor had come and gone, after we had had time to consider the idea of my strong, laughing father never waking again, that my mother asked how he had come to be in the path of the tree as it fell.

She looked at me, who had been with him. Esther looked at me, who had been with him.

Samuel said, “Did you see what happened, Ellie?” He turned to my mother. “Ellie knocked me down.”

And I simply could not say, I knocked you down to save your life.

I simply could not say, And the tree knocked Daddy down because of you.