The Source of All Things

by Tracy Ross

  “Oh, I know you do, sweetpea,” she answered. “That’s not what I mean.”

  The house became melancholy when Mom slept, and the wind sounded like someone scraping against the door. I went to my room and took out my Barbies, then tiptoed back down the hall. On the couch, Mom had covered her face with a blue-and-red afghan someone had crocheted for my unborn baby brother. I sat with my back against our new wallpaper—black velvet trees painted on a white background—and watched her chest rising and falling under the cover.

  4

  My Pa

  Okay,” said my new dad, Donnie, “you’re sure about this?” We were in the bathroom of our new house, on November 11, 1977. The previous summer, Mom and Dad had bought a new place on Parkway Drive. It resembled our old place, with three bedrooms, a basement, and two baths. But this one had so much built-in storage that the first time Chris and I went there, we played hide-and-seek in the walk-in closets for two solid hours. Now I also went to a new school called Harrison Elementary, and the next day, I would turn seven, becoming one of the older kids in my first-grade class. My hair was pulled into two tight ponytails that were wrapped around pink sponge rollers so they’d be curly for my birthday party the next day. All afternoon, my mom had baked, frosted, and decorated nineteen ice-cream-cone cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles on top. But the success of my birthday hinged on one thing only: I wanted to lose a tooth.

  I’d convinced myself that I couldn’t be happy unless a tooth came out before I turned seven, so I begged my dad to extract one for me. A few days earlier, Dad had gotten out his needle-nose pliers and tried to pry a tooth out of my mouth. He yanked and wiggled, scraping off some of my enamel. When I started to cry, he described an easier, more reliable tooth-pulling method. He would tie one end of a piece of floss around the tooth and the other end to a doorknob. When he slammed the door, the floss would yank, tearing my tooth, roots and all, out of my gum.

  I sat perfectly still, just like Dad instructed me to, but my insides felt like Jell-O. I held my breath and tried to think happy thoughts. I thought of my grandpa, and how fun it was to steal his Tums, which tasted like minty candies. And of camping at Magic Reservoir, where, during the summer, the water was always warm enough to swim. Dad looked at me while looping the clear floss around the doorknob. When he finished, he squatted down in front of me and put his hands on my kneecaps.

  “Your eyes are so big,” he said. “We don’t have to do this if you’re afraid.”

  I was afraid, but I trusted my new dad. He was the one I turned to when I needed a good adventure or big, strong hands to swoop me out of trouble. Over the summer, he’d taught me to roller-skate, ride my bike, and jump off the high dive at Harmon Park. My mom always watched, but she never urged me to test my bravery. Out in the living room, I could hear her laughing at something Sonny told Cher. I knew she was watching TV because she was too scared to see Dad ripping my bone from my head. I, on the other hand, was exceedingly brave. Even though it was November, I still went outside in my Wonder Woman swimsuit with a towel pinned around my neck. I ran laps around the trailer, flying in my invisible jet. I climbed fences and did cartwheels and chased Jigger around down the sidewalk in my bare feet. So it didn’t matter that my mom was hiding out in the basement, because I had my dad, and I had me.

  Dad stood with his hand on the door, waiting for my cue to slam it as hard as he could. A jolt of electricity shot through my spine and into my pigtails. Holding on to the backs of my legs, I said, “It’s okay, Daddy. Just do it, please?”

  A second later, Dad slammed the door, tearing the tooth out of my gum. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and blood-tinged drool trickled down my chin. Dad lunged for the tooth as it shot past him, tiny, square, and Chiclet-white. He scooped me up and sat me on his lap, where he kissed the blood-tinged drool off my lower lip.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “You’ll be the queen of the first grade.”

  He was right. The next day, I did feel like birthday royalty. My pigtails bounced like wire springs affixed to the sides of my temples. I carried a small, square mirror in the front pocket of my jumper and took it out often to admire the gap in my teeth. My tongue kept finding reasons to fiddle with the metallic-tasting hole until my teacher, Mrs. Galloway, asked me to stop.

  But I didn’t need a missing tooth—or anything else—to get me excited about going to Harrison Elementary. I already thought first grade was hitting the jackpot, because it meant I finally got to spend all day at school. In Mrs. Galloway’s class, I cruised through my reading lessons in the advanced reading group. Art and spelling were a cinch, and math was a piece of cake too. But after I realized the smart kids didn’t get any extra attention, I started intentionally writing down the wrong answers to my addition problems, so Mrs. Galloway would have to “help” me figure them out. (This didn’t last long, because it was only after I compulsively answered them correctly that I erased my answers and “recalculated” them. And my erasing skills weren’t as good as my math skills.)

  At recess Jenny Harr and I played our favorite game, Little House on the Prairie. Like every six- and seven-year-old girl in 1977, we were fanatic about the nineteenth-century capers of our tomboy heroine, Laura Ingalls, and her soon-to-be blind sister, Mary. I always let Jenny play Laura, but only because, deep down, I knew I was the more convincing actress. At home, I was constantly begging my dad to play Pa, and had actually cajoled Grandma Liz (an expert seamstress, among everything else) into sewing me not one but two sets of matching gunnysack nightgowns, because I needed one for me and the other for my “sister” Mary (a king-size pillow that I’d stolen from my parents room and slept next to at night).

  One day, I was sneaking bites of Milk Bones in the garage when I heard a voice call out, “Hey, half pint. You ready to go to market?” Amazed and confused, I replied, “Pa? Is that you?”

  “Sure is, half pint,” answered my brother. “I have the wagon ready. Now get your lunch pail and come on board.”

  Inside the wagon, Chris had placed a pillow, snacks, and my favorite sleeping bag, a gesture of rare, inexplicable kindness that, had I been older, would have raised a million red flags. But I was young and prone to bouts of loneliness, which made me only too eager to pretend. For weeks, I’d been strolling my Baby Alive around the neighborhood, looking for someone to play with. But all my friends were either on vacation or more interested in playing indoors. And besides, in one corner of the wagon, tucked below the lip, sat a plastic cup full of milk and a stack of graham crackers—my favorite.

  It was Indian summer, a Saturday, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Never before had my brother gone to such lengths to assist me in any game. His role had always been to ignore, tease, and berate me, then tickle me until I peed my pants. But now, the snack-filled wagon was ready, sitting at the top of our driveway. Chris helped me in and encouraged me to zip my sleeping bag up to my neck. I tucked my arms alongside my body while he worked the zipper up. Soon, the only thing sticking out of the bag was my face, shaded beneath the rim of my bonnet.

  “You snug as a bug, half pint?” my brother asked. But there was no time to answer. Knocking on the box with a wooden stick, he yelled, “Git up now, horsies!” and pushed the wagon down the steep pitch of our driveway.

  For the next twelve seconds, then, I was Laura Ingalls Wilder, rolling down a rutted wagon-train road on my way to Kansas City. I had my lunch pail (a plastic beach bucket) and my baby sister, Carrie (a Madame Alexander doll), next to me, and grand visions for the future. Sitting in front of us and guiding the horses was my one and only favorite and forever father, Pa, on the lookout for Mormons and marauding Indians.

  It was the best twelve seconds of my life. And then, on the thirteenth second, I was crashing into the pavement at the end of the driveway, where grey cement met gravelly black tarmac. Rolling out of the wagon but still wrapped in my sleeping bag, I was suddenly awash in a tornado of milk and graham crackers. Toys and dolls flew through the air, whacking me in the fac
e and body. When I landed, I was head down in the gutter and already wailing. Footsteps pounded toward me, interrupted by the sound of my brother’s cackling. And then, from the top of the driveway, another voice called out.

  “Dammit, Chris, what the hell are you doing?” yelled Dad. “Can’t you leave your sister alone for one single goddamn second? Get in the house—or I’ll give you a beating.”

  Dad’s footsteps hustled down the driveway and stopped outside the wall of cardboard. He was still cussing, which scared me to death. I’d been at the receiving end of his belt-whippings before and fully expected him to lift up the box, rip off his belt, and whip me, like the time he’d found Chris and me shoving and hitting each other in the downstairs shower and spanked us until we were bawling. He didn’t hit us often, but from time to time Chris and I could drive our dad to corporal punishment. I hoped today there would be no spanking.

  There wasn’t. My dad lifted me out of the gutter and wrapped me in his arms. The harder I cried, the tighter he held me, until it was time to go inside.

  Even though we lacked the same genes, it seemed my dad came preprogrammed to protect me. The previous summer, when I could barely swim, the family had gone to Nat-Soo-Pah hot springs. After a few rounds of Jaws and seeing who could hold their breath underwater the longest, Dad got out of the pool to change his clothes, leaving Chris and me under the watchful eye of our mom. Mom had never learned to swim, so I didn’t take chances when she watched us. But for some reason, I decided I needed to prove how brave I was to my dad.

  While Dad blow-dried his hair in the dressing room, Chris and I clung to the side of the pool, playing Motor Boat and pinching our noses. We probably farted in each other’s direction. At some point, I got out of the water and migrated toward the deep end, careful not to slip on the slimy cement. I was perched above the ten-foot-deep mark when Dad stepped out of the change room and back into the pool area.

  “Hey Daddy! Watch this!” I shouted and did a half cannonball into the water. Seconds later, when I came up for air and realized that my feet didn’t touch the bottom, I started sinking. Fully clothed, in a pair of snug Levi’s suspended by a King of Beers belt buckle, Dad dove in after me, outpacing the lifeguard on duty. I couldn’t have been more thrilled by my dad’s act of heroism, but when we surfaced, Dad was infuriated. “Why would you do that, Trace?” he shouted. “Why leap to your death when no one’s looking?”

  I’m sure my cheeks burned as I tried to come up with an answer. I hadn’t meant to scare my dad, just wanted him to marvel at my bravery. But my leap had unleashed a shock of repressed terror through his veins. I didn’t know then that his baby sister, Debbie, had died in the Wood River when she was three. A bank had collapsed beneath her and she slipped in. My then teenage father sprang into action, dropping his fly rod and jumping into the snowmelt-bloated rapids. But it was too late. The last time he saw Debbie alive she was disappearing under a tangle of logs in the river. The last time anyone saw her, she was hanging from a grappling hook that my grandfather had used to comb her waterlogged body out of a deep, slow-moving eddy.

  At the time, I didn’t know the story of Debbie and the grappling hook. All I knew was that my dad always materialized when I was in danger. It felt nice to have someone big, strong, and handsome watching over me. I knew that what I had was as good as—or better than—what any of my friends had, even with their shared-blood daddies.

  5

  Love Interrupted

  On September mornings during my seventh year, Dad, Chris, and I met Gary Mitchell and his daughter, Jeannie, at their farmhouse on the outskirts of Jerome. We drank hot chocolate and ate cinnamon rolls, then slinked along the irrigation canals where the pheasants hid in the sunflowers. Jeannie and I didn’t carry guns; we were only little girls. But when our dads dropped a bird out of the bruised autumn sky, we hugged each other with pioneer pride. We strung our bounty on a wire and hoisted it over our shoulders, pulling out the tail feathers and pretending to sword fight.

  Dad loved hunting with both of his kids. But given my unending enthusiasm, he especially liked hunting with me. Chris was generally stuck in his own boyhood agenda—playing the piano, building models with his Erector set, and hanging out in the underground fort Dad built in the empty lot next to our new house. Quality family time for Chris included all-day rounds of Battleship and practicing the various songs he was learning—by Rush, Van Halen, and Led Zeppelin—on the drums and electric guitar. Since his eleventh birthday, it also included chasing me around the living room with a cassette recorder, taping my beleaguered responses to his constant taunting about my being fat.

  Dad decided early on that I would be his longtime hunting partner, knowing that if I learned to love hunting, he would get to go more. He wanted us to drink cowboy coffee and eat gritty eggs as the sky turned shades you read about in westerns but never actually see unless you’re out there. Sometimes he talked about the day when we would pack our bags with cold meat sandwiches and watch our breath form clouds of exhaust on the windows of the jeep. When I got older, he said, we’d creep through the pine groves looking for deer warming themselves in bright strokes of sunlight. I’d follow my dad, watching his hand signals. At just the right moment, I’d drop onto the crisp, curled leaves that fell from the trees and made the ground look like a giant mosaic, then watch for my dad’s signal for me to take a shot. I’d pull the trigger, killing a winter’s worth of venison. After cleaning and field-dressing the steaming animal, we’d hike back to camp and share tin plates piled with elk pot roast and campfire-baked potatoes.

  “You watch, sis,” Dad would say, while we kicked the frost off dead grasses on our chilly late-autumn hikes. “When you’re big enough, we’ll spend every day of hunting season staked out in Big Piney. Far as I’m concerned, from now on, you’re my number one bird dogger in the family.”

  When Dad talked like this, I knew he was sniffing out the best me in me, helping to unearth my hidden talents. At home, I was good at all kinds of things—from ballet and tap lessons to Brownies and gymnastics—but I was also overweight. By third grade, I would tip the scale at eighty pounds, a good twenty more than most of my friends. The girls in my Donna Mauldin’s Dance Academy classes were all bones and eyelashes, with beautiful skin and tiny appetites. I had chipmunk cheeks and bumpy arms and could eat an entire six-inch Blimpie by myself. The ladies in my family didn’t approve; when I stayed with my grandma, she sent mixed messages, telling me to clean my plate one second and watch what I ate the next, and my mom had already started taking me to her high-end hairdresser, who trimmed, layered, and permed me until I was so ashamed of my appearance sometimes I refused to leave the house.

  At home I was just a “big-boned” kid trying to mask my extra pounds with a winning personality. But in the mountains my size was matched only by my desire to fish, hunt, hike, and swim. It helped that there were no mirrors for me to judge myself in. Only my dad’s expression, which, when he looked at me, said, You are strong, and beautiful, and perfect just as you are.

  Dad’s pride and joy—after his new family—was the Roadrunner camper-trailer he’d bought in 1976. On Thursdays, and sometimes as early as Wednesday, he’d start loading it with supplies: big bags of chips, Tang mixed with tea, and twelve-packs of minicereals for Chris and me. By the time the other dads on Parkway Drive were cracking their first weekend beers, we’d be chugging across the Perrine Bridge, past the lava flats with their searing heat, and approaching the cool, clean air of the Stanley Basin, where our favorite mountain range, the Sawtooths, top out at twelve thousand feet.

  In the long shadows of the Sawtooths, we built castles in the freshwater sand and took turns swimming out to a giant rock a few hundred feet from shore. Sometimes, other families came with us, and all the kids would hike together, searching for bird nests along wooden walkways that stretched over primordial wetlands, or climbing on top of beaver lodges before taking off shoes and pants and jumping into the murky ponds. At the time, the streams pouring
out of Redfish Lake teemed with sockeye salmon on their way home from the Pacific Ocean. As a little girl, I stared down at their rotting bodies covered with slime, the bulging eyes, and the long, hooked jawlines dotted with razor-sharp teeth. I was afraid but also fascinated, and though I couldn’t have articulated it then, I wondered what demon drove them to travel so far inland—without food or rest, for weeks—to decompose and die while furiously wiggling up the feeder streams that fanned off of my favorite lake.

  In my last, best memory of 1979, we’re on our way to Redfish Lake. I am eight years old, on the verge of entering third grade. Dad has eased the camper off the side of the road below our favorite hot spring, Russian John. Soaring, soft-edged mountains flank both sides of the road, and the sound of water burbles through brown-tipped grasses. Our clothes—Mom’s silk bra next to my size 8 flowered panties, big jeans and little jeans in a heap, a kid’s navy blue down vest, and a grown man’s camouflage hunting cap—are piled next to a juniper bush near the steaming pool. One by one we slip into water that smells like minerals and sage. My parents slide down the algae-covered rock and laugh—at the urgency, the cold air, and the slight, acceptable indiscretion we’re committing, uphill and just out of range of the car beams passing through the night.

  We soak until the last rays of sun paint the mountains pink. We all scan the hillsides for deer. Spot one and you earn a dollar: my new dad’s rule. A star—my dad points it out—burns itself into view. “Wish on it,” he says, and we all do. When our skin begins to prune, we jump out of the water, rushing to pull clothes over sticky goose-pimpled flesh. We run to our yellow Jeep Cherokee, where we blast the heater, screaming the lyrics to “Free Bird,” my all-time favorite song. It’s dark when I lift Mom’s head off my shoulder and move into the front seat. Dad and I call truckers on the CB radio, using our handles, Coyote and Pinky Tuscadero. Outside the window, the Sawtooths rise into the night.