I know the beat of a truck on a dirt road almost better than I know the beat of my heart. I was raised in the fields, where my feet smush into fertile grit and my hands flutter like the dragonflies I chase through flawless rows of rough, sticky corn plants. My family stomps through the cloudy ditch water, painting our ripped Levis and cotton T-shirts with liquid life. Sometimes the irrigation pipe clogs up with clay. On these days, my father takes his rusted shovel from the bed of the truck and goes to war.

My brother and I squat like frogs and catch the clumps of mud that my father flings over his shoulder. When the wet earth seeps into valleys in our hands, our skin tone changes from a dusty paleness to its usual golden hue, just as the rain rejuvenates the cracks in the soil outside our home.

I try to make my lumps of clay into the thin, curving pots formed by the experienced hands of my aunts. Today I want a wedding vase, squash blossom-like with thumb handles. My eyes search and find a large clump – there, behind my father’s left boot. Visions of selling my pot to admiring tourists in Santa Fe dance through my head.

My father digs into the pipe and throws the mud back violently. I bend to grab the clump. The shovel stabs into the trapped clay, and I examine my treasure; it’s perfect. I stand, and the shovel flies back – into my forehead.

Blood spatters on my brown T-shirt, my favorite pink cowboy boots, and my father’s T-shirt when he picks me up and runs to the truck, almost leaving my brother in the ditch in his haste to get to the hospital.

As my father speeds like a crazy man, my head resting on the window smears red on the blurred landscape outside. One-two-three, bump, one-two and right turn. I count the beats of the dirt road on the way to the city.

At the hospital, my father scoops me up and runs inside. I stare at my ruined boots while my father checks me in and the doctors settle me in a gurney. I wake up to my mother and a new haircut.

A blonde doctor comes in. “Hi sweetie!” she says in a high-pitched voice. “You got in a little tussle, didn’t you?” Why is Barbie in the emergency room, and why is she calling me sweetie? I wonder.

“I don’t know what a tussle is. But I have a laceration on my forehead,” I say bluntly. The doctor chuckles, and I see my parents’ shoulders relax. My brain must be working; I’m as sassy as ever.

“Yes, and you need stitches,” she says.

“How many?” my father asks, guilty tears rolling down his cheeks.

“About twenty. I’ll give her a shot to numb the pain.” She gestures toward a syringe on a metal tray next to her.

I’ve never been afraid of needles, but in this moment I feel like hearing something other than the twinkle of hospital telephones and the consoling chatter of doctors attending to others.

“Mom, can you tell me a story?” I ask, closing my eyes as the doctor positions the needle between my right eye and nose.

“What story, baby?”

“The turkey story.”

I hear a chair scrape and settle on my left side. My mother’s warm hand covers my small, muddy one. A sharp pain spreads through my face as the doctor injects the medicine.

“When I was a little girl,” my mother begins, “I stayed with my godparents a lot because my mom, your Nali, worked and my dad, your Te-eh, was … um … sick.” She removes the real reason from the story, aware of the doctor listening.

“My godparents, Be-bah John and Be-bah Veronica, had animals: cows, chickens, pigs, and one turkey. They called him Mean Turkey.” She chuckles.

“Mean Turkey liked to chase the kids, so Be-bah John kept him in a pen. One day, Be-bah Veronica was out shopping and all us kids were helping Be-bah John feed the animals. We were standing outside of Mean Turkey’s pen when a man on a motorcycle drove into the yard. Back then, there was no UPS on the Isleta rez, so a man we called Froggie brought everyone’s packages from the post office. All of us, including Be-bah John, went to help bring the big package into the house. But we didn’t check that we’d closed Mean Turkey’s pen.

“When we came out a few minutes later, we saw Mean Turkey sitting on Froggie’s motorcycle, which he’d left running. Be-bah John tried to scare him off, but Mean Turkey wouldn’t budge. He pecked and clawed at the men when they came close.

“He sat on that motorcycle for almost an hour, until the thing ran out of gas. As soon as it sputtered and died, Mean Turkey hopped off and booked it back to his pen. It was the damnedest thing we’d ever seen.”

My mother is shaking with laughter, and my teary-eyed father cracks a small smile.

“All done,” the doctor says. “Your mama is an excellent storyteller. I’ve never seen a patient so calm while getting that many stitches. I think it even helped me work faster, imagining how long it would take to patch up someone who’d gotten attacked by a motorcycle-obsessed turkey. In fact, I have a turkey story of my own ….”