The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross Read Free Book Online Page A

room and back into the pool area.
    â€œHey 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 inthe 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
    O n 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 ofBattleship 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