Educated: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

Tara recalls a story from her childhood in which Grandpa-down-the-hill, thrown from his horse up on the mountain, returned home to the porch covered in blood. After taking him to the hospital, Grandma-down-the-hill went looking for the mare that had thrown him up on the mountain. She found it tethered to a post by a knot only her grandpa Lott had ever known how to tie. Grandpa-down-the-hill woke from surgery and swore that he’d heard voices while he was unconscious—the voice of Lott and others. This story always made Tara and her siblings feel safe up on the mountain, and guarded by ancestors who’d protect them from harm.

 Tara reveals the details of her father’s accident. While draining fuel from cars in the junkyard, a tank exploded. Dad had been wearing a long-sleeved shirt, leather gloves, and a welding shield over his face. The flames caught his clothes on fire and “melted through the shield as if it were a plastic spoon,” consuming the skin and muscle on the lower half of his face and “liquefying” it. Tara doesn’t understand, to this day, how Dad was able to drag himself down the mountain—but somehow he did, and one of Tara’s cousins found him knocking at the kitchen door. Mother tried to take Dad to the hospital, but he told her he’d rather die, and so she covered his body in salve and fed him ice chips. Dad’s burns were so bad he could barely breathe, and Mother and her assistants used “energy work” to keep his lungs moving.

After getting off the phone with Audrey, Tara tells Nick that she has to go to Idaho for a few days for “a family thing, nothing serious.” Tara hesitates at the last minute, afraid that she will pass her strep along to Dad, but when she calls Mother to ask what to do she replies that Tara’s strep won’t matter—Dad will not live much longer.

Tara is horrified the moment she walks in the house by the smell of charred flesh and the sight of Mother changing Dad’s slimy bandages and prying his burnt ears away from his skull with a butter knife. Dad smells “like meat gone to rot,” and the bottom half of his face is red and raw. Dad is terribly dehydrated, and in the absence of any help from doctors or hospitals, Mother has resorted to giving him enemas in an attempt to flush some water into his system.

Tara waits out the night sleeping on the living room floor with Mother and Audrey. As dawn arrives, Dad stops breathing, and they believe he has died—but after several long seconds, he coughs and starts breathing again. Tara leaves home and returns to BYU, determined to give Dad the best chance of survival by removing her infection from the house.

Mother stops working at her essential oil business to tend to Dad full time. It is a miserable job, and Tara hears that Mother, Audrey, and the others have gone through seventeen gallons of salve in just two weeks. Tyler flies in from Purdue to help with the laborious, painful work of debriding Dad’s burns daily. Tara herself returns once she is sure that her strep is gone, and helps out by feeding him water and pureed vegetables with a dropper. Mother tries to buy Dad painkillers, but he refuses them, insisting that he wants to “feel every part of” what he believes is “the Lord’s pain.”