Educated: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

That winter, Tara begins having unsettling visions of herself pregnant and begging to go to the hospital, but barred from entering by her father. She realizes that “no future” she might have will be able to hold both her own desires and her father’s. One evening, after Tara has already gone to bed, Dad comes into her room and sits with her. He tells her that he has been “praying” about her desire to go to college, and has received a message. Dad says that “the Lord” is “displeased” with Tara’s decision to “whore after man’s knowledge,” and will soon incur God’s “wrath.”

The next morning, Tara finds Mother mixing oils in the kitchen. Tara announces that she has decided not to go to college. Her mother is disappointed, and Tara is shocked—she thought Mother would be “glad to see [her] yield to God.” Mother quietly, urgently tells Tara that she shouldn’t “let anything stop [her] from going,” but as Dad’s footsteps approach the kitchen, Mother hurriedly turns back to her work.

Without Shawn, Dad’s construction business is suffering, and so Tara returns to scrapping that winter to make some extra money. Every morning, she wakes up early to study for the ACT before heading out to the junkyard. When the day of the test comes, Tara is nervous—she has never taken an exam in her life. On the day of the test, she is confused by the bubble sheet and forced to ask the proctor how to use it. Tara drives home from the test center feeling “stupid,” grateful for the first time all winter to be headed to the scrap yard—the world where she feels she belongs.

That spring, as the cold weather turns warm, Tara wishes she could take her shirt off in the heat of the afternoon like her brothers. Instead, she settles for rolling up the sleeves of her shirt—every time she does, though, Dad commands her to unroll them, accusing her of dressing like a whore.

Tara begins hoarding her paychecks on the off chance her ACT scores come back good enough for admission to BYU—but Dad has been forcing her to pay part of the family’s car insurance to show her that “Government fees will break [her.]” When her test scores come back somewhat low but better than Tara hoped for, Mother rejoices at the news, but Dad tells Tara it’s time for her to move out. Mother, quickly going along with Dad, asks Tara to move out by Friday. Tara explodes in rage and grief, and Mother counters by saying that when she was Tara’s age, she was already living on her own. Tara protests that she’s only sixteen. Mother seems genuinely confused—she’d thought Tara was twenty. She softens and tells Tara she can stay at home.

Several months after the accident, Shawn returns to work. He helps Dad out a few hours a day building a barn about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak. Tara, meanwhile, continues working the scrap yard. Dad comes home one day with a “frightening” machine called the Shear—it is a “three-ton pair of scissors” with blades “twelve inches thick and five feet across.” It is used to cut iron, which Dad wants to do so that he can sell the pieces. The Shear is an imperfect machine, snapping the iron more than cutting it, and occasionally recoiling and driving whoever’s operating it towards the blades. Tara is more shocked by the force and danger of the Shear than any other of her father’s “dangerous schemes” throughout the years.

Shawn calls the Shear a death machine, and when he sees Dad teaching Tara to use it just moments after the blade injures Luke, Shawn protests and pulls Tara away from the giant scissor’s jaws. Dad insists that Tara is strong enough to operate the machine, but Shawn will not let Tara near it again. She watches as the two of them scream at one another and eventually begin fighting physically. Dad ultimately says that if Tara doesn’t operate the Shear, she won’t get to live under his roof. Shawn retaliates by stating that if Tara is going to work the Shear, he’s going to help her—and give up his construction job.

For over a month, Shawn and Tara run the Shear together each day. Tara manages to avoid any major injury, receiving only a few bruises. Shawn has a hard time with the work, weak and disoriented as he is from his accident—but every morning, they get ready together and head out to the scrap yard to work, spotting one another as they feed iron into the giant machine.