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By Root 187 0

—certainly with more responsibility than I’d ever trust my kids with. My mom was notorious for drumming old-fashioned, midwestern values into our heads and my brother’s command soon became, “It’s your job to take care of your brother and sister, no matter what.” Even at three, he did. He helped feed me and my sister, bathed us, entertained us, watched us as we toddled around the yard. There are pictures in our family albums of Micah rocking my sister to sleep while feeding her a bottle, despite the fact that he wasn’t all that much bigger than she was. I’ve come to understand that it was good for him, because a person has to learn a sense of responsibility. It doesn’t magically appear one day, simply because you suddenly need it. But I think that because Micah was frequently treated as an adult, he actually believed he was an adult, and that certain rights were owed him. I suppose that’s what led to an almost adult sense of stubborn entitlement long before he started school.

My earliest memory, in fact, is about my brother. I was two and a half—Micah a year older—on a late-summer weekend, and the grass was about a foot high. My dad was getting ready to mow the lawn and had pulled the lawn mower out from the shed. Now Micah loved the lawn mower, and I vaguely remember my brother pleading with my father to let him mow the lawn, despite the fact that he wasn’t even strong enough to push it. My dad said no, of course, but my brother—all thirty pounds of him—couldn’t see the logic of the situation. Nor, he told me later, was he going to put up with such nonsense.

In his own words, “I decided to run away.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. He’s three and a half years old—how far could he go? My oldest son, Miles, used to threaten to run away at that age, too, and my wife and I responded thus: “Go ahead. Just make sure you don’t go any farther than the corner.” Miles, being the gentle and fearful child that he was, would indeed go no farther than the corner, where my wife and I would watch him from the kitchen window.

Not my brother. No, his thinking went like this: “I’m going to run far away, and since I’m always supposed to take care of my brother and sister, then I guess I have to take them with me.”

So he did. He loaded my eighteen-month-old sister in the wagon, took my hand, and sneaking behind the hedges so my parents couldn’t see us, began leading us to town. Town, by the way, was two miles away, and the only way to get there was to cross a busy two-lane highway.

We nearly made it, too. I remember marching through fields with weeds nearly as tall as I was, watching butterflies explode into the summer sky. We kept going for what seemed like forever before finally reaching the highway. There we stood on the shoulder of the road—three children under four, mind you, and one in diapers—buffeted by powerful gusts of wind as eighteen-wheelers and cars rushed past us at sixty miles an hour, no more than a couple of feet away. I remember my brother telling me, “You have to run fast when I tell you,” and the sounds of honking horns and screeching tires after he screamed “Run!” while I toddled across the road, trying to keep up with him.

After that, things are a little sketchy. I remember getting tired and hungry, and finally crawling into the wagon with my sister, while my brother dragged us along like Balto, the lead husky, pushing through Alaskan snow. But I also remember being proud of him. This was fun, this was an adventure. And despite everything, I felt safe. Micah would take care of me, and my command from my mother had always been, “Do what your brother tells you.”

Even then, I did as I was told. Unlike my brother, I would grow up doing what I was told.

Sometime later, I remember heading over a bridge and up a hill; once we reached the top, we could see the town in the valley below. Years later, I understood that we must have been gone for hours—little legs can only cover two miles so fast—and I vaguely remember my brother promising us some ice cream to eat. Just then, we heard shouting, and as I looked over my shoulder,