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Westover imparts a memory of her brother, Tyler, announcing to the family that he is going to college. Westover remembers asking, “What’s college?” (49), which sends Gene into a lecture about lying, socialist college professors who are agents of the Illuminati. Despite his best efforts, Gene cannot talk Tyler out of going to college.
Westover then describes Tyler in more detail. As a child, he was different from everyone else in the family: organized, clean, and conscientious. Instead of roughhousing with his brothers, Tyler liked to listen to classical and choral music on his boombox and study quietly in his room. Westover remembers listening to music with Tyler in the evenings and being inspired by his gracefulness.
This leads Westover to reflect on her education growing up. Faye was idealistic about education when the children were young, believing she could teach the children as well as any public school could. When she did hold “school,” she would send the children off on their own with the four or five outdated textbooks the family owned. Westover remembers thumbing through the pages of the books and later lying to her mother that she had completed hundreds of math problems.
Although Faye protested, Gene eventually convinced her that the children should learn practical skills by working in the junkyard with him all day. The only child who continued his education independently—at the time, at least—was Tyler. He would often refuse to work the junkyard in the mornings so that he could study, which resulted in ongoing fights with Gene. Westover tells readers that some mornings, Gene would win and Tyler would go to work. Other mornings, Tyler would win and Gene would storm out angrily.
As a child, Westover did not truly believe Tyler would go away to college and “join the Illuminati” (56). She thought he would stay at home with the family. But one morning in August, she awoke to find Tyler packing his clothes and belongings. She ran into the mountains, upset and sad, and watched as he climbed into his truck and began to drive away. At the last second, she sprinted down to the road to hug him goodbye. Westover tells readers that it took her many years to understand why Tyler left home, and “what leaving that day had cost him” (59).
Westover describes life after Tyler leaves home. That winter, her older sister, Audrey, turned 15, got her driver’s license, obtained a job flipping burgers, and spent less time at home. Westover remembers barely ever seeing Audrey, and with Tyler gone, she felt like the family was shrinking.
That left Westover and her remaining brothers to pick up the slack working for Gene in the family’s junkyard. At the same time, Faye’s memory started getting worse. Gene encouraged her to return to midwifing, but Faye feared her memory issues would be a danger to the mothers and babies. To compensate for her memory issues, Faye took up a technique called “muscle testing” (66), where she would close her eyes, ask her body what it needed, and wait for it to respond physically with an answer. Both she and Gene believed it was a divine gift.
That winter, Westover kept thinking about Tyler and decided to take up studying like he did, though it made Gene suspicious and uncomfortable. At winter’s end, Westover went back to working full time in the junkyard. One day, Gene insisted that Westover attempt to do something extremely dangerous: He wanted her to sit in a large bin of metal scraps while he forklifted it into the dump. Gene told Westover to jump out of the bin right before he dropped it into the dump, but her leg got impaled by a pointy piece of metal and she got stuck. Panicked, she realized that her dad would dump the bin even if she was still in it. She desperately tried to climb out and fell out instead. By a stroke of luck, she landed on the ground. Seemingly unconcerned, Gene sent her back to the house alone to have Faye heal her.
Soon after the injury, Westover told Gene that she wanted to go to college. In response, Gene asked if she remembered the story of Jacob and Esau. Although he did not say anything else about it, Westover knew he meant that if she went to college, she would be a traitor to her family, betraying her birthright.
Westover details the events of that summer when her brother, Luke, and Gene worked in the junkyard draining gasoline from cars. Luke’s jeans had gotten soaked in gasoline, and Westover was in the kitchen doing the dishes when she heard a terrifying cry coming from the yard. She ran outside to see Luke collapsing onto the ground, the jeans on his left leg melted away. His jeans had caught on fire from the gasoline, and nearly all his skin was burned off.
Luke called out desperately for Faye, but she was not at home, so Westover tended to him instead. She tried her mother’s essential oils first, which did not help at all, then tried to think of another way to cool the burn. She ran in the house, emptied a dirty old trash can, and filled it with water. She then frantically wrapped Luke’s leg in plastic trash bags and helped him stand up to put his leg in the trash can full of water.
Soon after this, Gene returned home from work, and he and Westover decided they should wait until Faye got home to do anything else. When Faye arrived home, she scolded Westover for putting Luke’s leg in a dirty trash can and risking it getting infected, but then quickly jumped to action to tend to Luke’s leg herself. She and Westover stayed by his bedside all night, giving him herbs for the pain. About three weeks after the fire, Luke’s skin slowly began to grow back. Luke returned to work in the junkyard soon after.
Remembering the incident years later, Westover feels that there are inconsistencies in the story. She cannot remember who put out the fire on Luke’s leg, but she remembers her mother treating burns on her father’s hands after treating Luke the day of the fire. She believes that her father put the fire out with his hands, then left Luke so that he could put out the fire spreading through the junkyard. She imagines her father was chanting “[t]he Lord will provide” (82) during the whole situation.
Westover recalls wanting to get away from the junkyard more than ever after Luke’s injury. Although she was only 11, she got a job babysitting for a family in town. One Sunday at church, Westover heard Mary, the woman she babysat for, playing the piano. She asked Mary if she would give her piano lessons instead of paying her for babysitting.
Westover also started taking dance lessons. At the first lesson, the teacher told Westover to buy a leotard and dance shoes, but she said she could not because they were not modest. Nevertheless, Faye took Westover to buy dance clothes but told her to hide them from Gene. When it came time to make costumes for her first dance recital, Westover was appalled by the sheer fabrics and length of the dance skirts that the other girls wanted to wear. Watching the 6-year-olds try on their costumes, she thought they looked like “tiny harlots” (87). Because of her family’s concerns with modesty, Westover’s entire dance class had to wear long gray sweatshirts for costumes. Despite the compromise, both Westover and her mother kept the recital a secret from Gene. The night of the recital, Gene got Faye to admit to what Westover had been doing.
Before the recital, Westover kept trying to stretch her sweatshirt out in hopes of making it more modest. During the recital, she refused to do any of the dance moves that would cause her sweatshirt to ride up. She realized her father was in the audience, and his eyes were the only eyes she was aware of in the entire auditorium. The other girls were angry that Westover ruined the performance by doing the moves incorrectly, but all she cared about was her father’s belief that the girls who performed in the recital were immodest and “jumping about like whores in the Lord’s house” (90).
After the dance recital debacle, Faye searched for a new activity for Westover to get involved in. Faye found her a voice teacher, and after a few lessons, Westover got to sing at church. The congregation was impressed with Westover’s singing voice, and the choir director even invited her to join the choir. Westover was most pleased that her father was proud of her. He even allowed her to audition for the lead role in a community musical production of Annie.
Westover recounts the summer of 1999, when she was 13. That summer, her father went into another intense phase of preparing for the apocalypse, and Westover sang the lead in a local production of the Broadway play Annie.
Gene’s latest interpretation of the Days of Abomination came in the form of Y2K. Gene believed that, on January 1, 2000, all technology would fail, and the world would descend into total chaos. He made the entire family seal and store away food in the cellar all summer and fall to prepare.
Westover’s rehearsals for Annie were her only escape from the Y2K preparations, but she felt incapable of communicating with the “normal kids” (93) at the theater. Surprisingly, Gene was supportive of Westover’s plays. When Westover got a case of tonsillitis that winter, Gene even told her to let the sunlight heal her tonsils by standing in the yard with her mouth wide open. Instead of seeing a doctor, Westover did this every day for a month.
Soon after the case of tonsillitis, Westover met a boy named Charles at the Worm Creek Opera House. When Charles introduced himself, he told Westover that her singing was “about the best [he] ever heard” (96). Westover found herself imagining a reality in which she and Charles were friends, but when she imagined Charles coming to her house at Buck’s Peak, her eagerness turned into embarrassment and panic. She imagined him discovering the family’s preparations for the Days of Abomination.
The Y2K preparations resumed as Christmas approached. On December 31, Westover could sense her father’s excitement. Everyone at church had laughed at her father when he preached on about the Days of Abomination; he felt that that was the day he would be vindicated.
But midnight came and went. It was January 1, 2000, and nothing happened. Westover waited for the electricity to go out, for the television screen to flicker and die. When nothing had happened by 1:30 a.m., Westover decided to go to bed. Gene stayed awake, staring at the television screen, motionless. He seemed smaller to Westover that night than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features seemed childlike to her; she wondered how God could deny him his justification.
As Westover describes more experiences that she had at home with her family—both things that happened to her and things she witnessed happening to other family members—her memories begin to expand to include places and people beyond the mountain. When her older brother, Tyler, goes off to college, Westover is disappointed and suspicious at first. She believes, as her father has told her, that Tyler will be brainwashed by the professors at school. In a way, she sees Tyler’s choice to leave home as a rejection of her home. In Westover’s young world, and as she has been raised to believe, a person cannot be a part of two different worlds. When Tyler leaves, she believes he has abandoned his childhood home in favor of another. Then her older sister Audrey soon follows suit: She becomes rebellious and obstinate, gets a job, stops working for Gene in the junkyard, and is rarely ever home again. Because she thinks of her home on Buck’s Peak as the center of the universe, Westover believes that her siblings are breaking the family apart.
However, readers realize that “home” is not an idyllic or even safe place for Westover. By the time Westover turns 11, she has seen some shocking things happen at home. She witnesses her older brother nearly being burned to death, while her father does nothing to help him. Westover’s mother has experienced a traumatic brain injury after a dangerous car accident. And the entire family has yet another extended experience with the consequences of Gene’s paranoia, loss of touch with reality, and delusions of grandeur when he forces everyone to spend weeks stockpiling food and preparing for “the end of the world” at Y2K in the year 2000. Gene’s manic demands of the family appear to be more than just an annoyance; he assures Westover and her siblings that there will be chaos at Y2K: looting, stealing, and violence. He even brings home a gun to use against looters.
Although still deeply loyal to home and to her father, Westover is beginning to become curious about the possibilities of the outside world. Her siblings’ examples, combined with the bad aftertaste of Westover’s dangerous experiences with her father on the mountain, inspire her to venture off. Even though she is far too young to work, she gets a job in town babysitting. She starts taking piano and dance lessons. She even tells Gene that, like Tyler, she wants to go to college.
During this time, Westover begins to experience a cultural clash between her reality at home and the realities of the outside world. The more time she spends doing activities in town, the more she realizes that she is not like other children because of the way her parents have raised her. She is delighted by the opportunity to take dance lessons, yet she feels an aversion to the way she is asked to dress and is aware that her family does not approve. Although Westover is inspired by Tyler’s ability to get into college and leave home, Gene makes it clear that to leave home is to betray the family. Westover even refers to Tyler’s choice to leave the mountain as a journey across “enemy lines” (59). And Westover reads these experiences with the outside world through the lens of her father’s beliefs: Tyler and Audrey are hurting the family, and the other girls in dance class who wear the revealing costumes are “tiny harlots” (87). Everything Westover experiences, she views through the perspective of her home and her family, which is her sole reality. In the end, the tension between family and freedom that Westover establishes in this section become an important idea that stretches throughout the rest of her memoir.
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