Dad was in the living room, shuffling through blueprints for the granaries
and mumbling to himself. I’d watched him sketch those blueprints, watched
him perform the calculations, altering this angle or lengthening that beam.
Dad had little formal education in mathematics but it was impossible to doubt
his aptitude: somehow I knew that if I put the equation before my father, he
would be able to solve it.
When I’d told Dad that I planned to go to college, he’d said a woman’s
place was in the home, that I should be learning about herbs—“God’s
pharmacy” he’d called it, smiling to himself—so I could take over for
Mother. He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was whoring after
man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to ask him about
trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I was certain he
possessed.
I scribbled the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Dad didn’t look up as I
approached, so gently, slowly, I slid the paper over the blueprints. “Dad, can
you solve this?”
He looked at me harshly, then his eyes softened. He rotated the paper,
gazed at it for a moment, and began to scrawl, numbers and circles and great,
arcing lines that doubled back on themselves. His solution didn’t look like
anything in my textbook. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen. His
mustache twitched; he mumbled. Then he stopped scribbling, looked up and
gave the correct answer.
I asked how he’d solved it. “I don’t know how to solve it,” he said,
handing me the paper. “All I know is, that’s the answer.”
I walked back to the kitchen, comparing the clean, balanced equation to the
mayhem of unfinished computations and dizzying sketches. I was struck by
the strangeness of that page: Dad could command this science, could
decipher its language, decrypt its logic, could bend and twist and squeeze
from it the truth. But as it passed through him, it turned to chaos.
I studied trigonometry for a month. I sometimes dreamed about sine, cosine
and tangent, about mysterious angles and concussed computations, but for all
this I made no real progress. I could not self-teach trigonometry. But I knew
someone who had.
Tyler told me to meet him at our aunt Debbie’s house, because she lived
near Brigham Young University. The drive was three hours. I felt
uncomfortable knocking on my aunt’s door. She was Mother’s sister, and