If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson Page A

hawks. I have never witnessed a death so slow. I was there when it finally happened. The two birds, covered in flies, finally stumbled apart and moved toward opposite corners of the courtyard. Their progress was hindered because they could not see, their eyelids closed and swarmed by the flies. Every so often one would lose its balance and collapse sideways onto the stone, or else reel forward and back like a drunk, clumpsof feathers scattering in its wake like tattered, shiftless cerements. I did not smash their heads with rocks. I did not slice their throats with a kitchen knife. I only watched as they floundered to the rose beds and clawed beneath the brush, biding time in separate charnels, a wonder to the worms.

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    FALL
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    A BLACKFACE EWE stumbles in a northern wind. She is high in the mountains on the Isle of Skye—a small but sturdy chip of land long ago cast from the great shoulders of the mainland. The ewe works a clump of grass against a toothless upper jaw as she leans her heavy, woolen flank against a rock for balance. As the wind tumbles down the cliff she recognizes the distant bleating of lambs, her own and others, but rambles further up the mountainside, chewing as she goes. Further down, some members of the flock sense her distance and look up from their grazing. They recognize her absence and are unnerved. How far she has wandered . A young ram lowers his head to scrape his horns in a patch of shorn grass and wet mud, blinking into the rain. An older ram takes off in the direction of the wayward ewe, but stops short to gum a silver stalk of asphodel bent over the cold water of a shallow stream.
    This stream slices its way down the mountainside and collects under the wooden bridge where we are gathered, belly-down and hovering over the water, our faces submerged for seven, six, five more seconds. My arms shake as I try to hold myself up. Graeme is counting down from somewhere, laughing as he reminds us of the promise of eternal youth and beauty, the Scottish fable that has us facedown in this frigid water, eye to eye with a tiny world of undulating lichen, microscopic fairies tucked into their folds. I remember now why I prefer to travel by myself; even lonely, even hungry, even weatherworn and aimless. I stay this side of sea level.
    Five years before I journey alone to Scotland, my father sits in his mother’s attic in the Philadelphia suburbs and takes shots of Gordon’s vodka from the bottle. Her new townhouse is in a town called Worcester, thirty miles north of where I grew up, on the top of a hill so high it is always windblown and cloud-covered, like a castle in a fairytale. He reads a book about a seagull that shares his name: Jonathan. He folds his T-shirts and places calls to my cell phone, none of which I answer. Two flights down, my grandmother Cynthia sips tea and mutters softly to herself as she turns off lights and locks doors, her legs swollen with her latest bout of sciatica. It is so painful she has to grip the banister with both hands and drag her weight slowly up the stairs. She is unhappy with a son living upstairs again, but grateful for what she believes to be his new sobriety, the catalogues from community colleges collecting on her dining room table, and the working stove that he has rigged together with an ell bracket and a spool offishing wire. Jon is forty-four years old and has spent most of this time drunk, drugged, and drained, in a constant battle with his own brain.
    He is a tired, uneager student.
    The group wipes at red cheeks and ambles toward the idling gray bus: eleven Korean college students and me. I’ve latched on to the tail end of their three-week tour after introducing myself to Graeme in the living room of my Skye hostel. He agrees to let me onto his tour bus for their last day on the island only after I promise to teach his group a “quality American drinking game” when we return. Eventually, I’ll teach them Flip Cup in the dim kitchen of the