Lifting the Sky Read online

  I was standing there trying hard not to think of the tractor plowing its way through the earth and popping up in China, and wearing such a silly grin he must’ve thought I was a happy camper. My dark reddish brown hair was all scrunched up under my blue baseball cap and sometimes I can almost pass for a boy till I open my mouth. I’m kind of substandard runt-sized for my age, so I stretched up real tall trying to look at least thirteen—which I was, almost. I puffed up my chest, not that it did any good. It’ll probably be aeons before I’m not flat as Kansas.

  Mr. McCloud nodded at me and I nodded back but kept quiet.

  “You know,” he said, turning to my mom, “it’s a forty-five-minute trip back down that road you came up. You’d have to get your kid”—he glanced at me—“your young lady, down to catch the school bus. It’s another hour to the school. No easy way around that. We haven’t had a youngster on this place since I don’t know when. Don’t know how that’d work out.”

  My mom could’ve told him that by great good luck and fortune I was going to finish up the school year by mail, but she just stood there and said nothing, so I did.

  “I’m homeschooled,” I piped up, giving him the biggest smile ever. Behind my back I crossed all my fingers.

  Mr. McCloud’s eyebrows lifted. He looked from me to my mom and then to Stew Pot in back of the truck. He was silent for a long moment, as if weighing the situation. “This place has been left to the hired hands to handle for the past several years,” he went on. “There are some heifers about to calve, and the fences and ditches are in pretty bad shape. But we’re short of hands at the moment. I live on another place, mostly, on our main ranch off the reservation, about forty-five miles due east of here. I get out here only once in a while to check up on things. I’d like to be movin’ along soon as these heifers have calved.”

  My mom finally spoke up. “I can handle it,” she said.

  Mr. McCloud gestured toward a small log cabin that was partly hidden by trees beside the creek. “That’s where I bunk out when I’m here,” he said. He jerked his thumb at a wooden building beside the barn and added, “And that’s the bunkhouse for the hands.”

  He stopped as though his train of thought had taken another track. I could almost see the wheels churning as another thought hitched up.

  “The old homestead’s up there apiece on the hill. It’s where I grew up. Where I used to live…” He gestured to a place up the road, though we couldn’t see any house because the road bent around some aspen, cottonwood, and golden willow trees that glowed in the late-morning sunlight with the first yellow-green buds of spring. The ranch lay snuggled in a sheltered valley, and all around its fenced pastures rose hills and cliffs and canyons, and behind those, high mountains.

  Mr. McCloud stared down at his hands. There was a long silence when all we could hear was the sound of the creek and some birds. “House hasn’t been lived in for almost three years,” he finally said. “It would need fixin’ up, but it should be livable. You can bunk out up there.”

  “Okay,” was all my mom said. She hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words and she’d landed the job.

  Chapter Three

  Mr. McCloud tipped his hat. “Well, ma’am,” he said. “Just follow me then, and I’ll show you two up to the house.” He climbed into the big diesel truck parked by the barn and we followed in Ol’ Yeller.

  My mom reached over and touched my knee and smiled. My fingers were now so stuck together from crossing and recrossing that I had to pry them apart.

  As soon as we rounded the bend of trees, I felt like laughing and crying and shouting out loud—it was all just as I’d drawn it! A secret place up in the mountains with canyons and cliffs and a long winding stream—and there, up in one corner, on a hill overlooking hay meadows, stood a high-tall two-story house.

  “Blue, you’ll catch a fly if you don’t close your mouth,” my mom said as we drove into the driveway and stopped, but I’d already flown out of the truck. I ran to the house and touched it to be sure it was real. My legs started wobbling. I felt so dizzy I sank to my heels. Stew Pot trotted over, his worried ears cocked, and stuck his nose in my face.

  “Oh, Stew Pot,” I whispered. “I think we’ve just stepped into my drawing!”

  The house I’d drawn had looked just like this one all right, but it had been a happy, sunshiny house. This one seemed lonely and sad, with its windows blank and dirty and dark. Sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and scraggly wild rosebushes had taken over the yard.

  From somewhere that sounded far off I could hear a voice saying, “This whole place has been going downhill for the past several years. Maybe you’d be better off down in the bunkhouse.”

  No, no, it’s perfect, I wanted to shout, but the words stuck in my throat as I looked over at Mr. McCloud. I squinted. I rubbed my eyes. No, they weren’t playing tricks. He was standing in the wild, overgrown yard looking like he’d just stepped into a rainbow. Rosy pink floated out of his middle. Emerald green shot out of his chest. Out of his throat bubbled a lovely deep blue that floated up into bright yellow. Misty lavender circled his head like a cloud.

  I’d seen them before. The lights. But never, ever like this. It was as if I’d never seen color before.

  Truth is, I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen colored mists flashing around people and animals and sometimes even out of trees and rocks and plants. But almost as soon as I’d see them, poof!—they’d disappear. I used to wonder what I was seeing, but I just figured everyone saw the same exact way I did. The one time I did say something about flashing lights, my mom rushed me straight off to an eye doctor. He gave me some drops. But of course the drops hadn’t changed anything. I still saw lights, but I learned to say nothing about them, and to pay no attention to them. As I got older the lights had grown dimmer and dimmer.

  But these lights I couldn’t ignore. Was it because we were so high up in the mountains? Or because of the pure mountain air?

  I looked around. Even the sky seemed bluer than blue and alive with tiny balls of bright bouncing lights. The trees shimmered with a reddish gold glow. I stared at my mom, who was now looking intently at me. She glowed like a rainbow too.

  My mind raced. And then suddenly I remembered the story my mom told me about how she’d come up with my name, Blue, when my eyes weren’t even close to being blue—in fact they’re greenish brown. The way my mom told the story, when I was born there was a deep blue hazy light around me that all those in the room could see. It was indigo blue, she said, as blue as the farthest mountains beneath an evening sky, and all the pretty names she’d thought of had flown right out the window and into the bluest of blues beyond. And that’s why she named me Blue.

  My mom said she never saw the blue light around me again. When I was little I’d look in the mirror, but those blue lights never showed up. Sometimes, though, I’d look at myself in the dark and think I could see a blue-white glow around my hands.

  Just in case you think that with such an introduction into the world I might’ve turned into something special, you’d be wrong. In school I shine in art and I’m pretty good in English and history, but that’s been the extent of my stardom. I’m a dud at basketball, for rather obvious reasons. And then there’s track, which is my favorite sport even though I’m always stumbling over my feet. For some reason they’ve grown at a much faster rate than the rest of me.

  I don’t shine in the area of fashion, either, because when it comes to the subject of clothes, well, the less said the better. Or as my mom says, the less, the better. What fits into one suitcase is all I’ve got. I don’t care, though. There are lots of things more important than clothes. My mom says it’s not the clothes that make the man, and no woman should think they make her, either. And to be perfectly honest, I must’ve missed out on the gene that makes a girl give a hoot about clothes.

  While I’m on the subject of me, my last name’s Gaspard. It’s French ’cause of my dad, who was born in Paris, France, oh my. He dropped off the earth th
e week before I turned five.

  “He was a sweet-singing, dude-ranch-wrangling, ram-headed, hard-drinking, French-speaking, arrogant charmer,” my mom once said, “and when he was sober he could be a delight, but when he was drunk he was horrid.”

  It was the longest string of words she’d ever strung together. I wrote them down in my journal under the title, “My Dad.” Every time I remember or hear something about him I scribble it down.

  After my dad took off we were on the go searching for him. The ranches my mom hired on at were dude ranches, mostly—the kind of places where sweet-singing French wranglers might be. Later I suspected the tables had turned and she kept moving on so my dad wouldn’t know where to find us. The ranches she chose then were all rough-and-tumble hard-working places no dude would ever set foot on, especially someone like my dad.

  Sometimes I wished I didn’t look so much like him. Every once in a while I’d catch my mom staring at me, and then she’d sigh and slip into deep quiet, and I’d know she was thinking of him. I’ve got his same fiery dark auburn hair and his greenish brown eyes.

  My mom’s real name is Maggie, but everyone calls her Mam. From the time I was just a baby I heard the cowboys calling her ma’am, so that’s what I learned to call her myself. As I grew I used to wonder why everyone we met already seemed to know her name, and why the cowboys tipped their hats politely when they said it. I thought maybe she’d been a movie star or a rodeo queen or someone really famous before I happened along.

  But now my mom startled me out of my daze by touching my shoulder. “You okay, Blue?” she asked.

  I nodded. I must’ve looked really dopey sitting there on my heels, blinking and shaking my head. I got up and took a deep breath to steady myself. I’d ignore the lights, do my best to just act normal—something I was feeling real far from.

  I followed behind Stew Pot as he sniffed his way round the house. Sticking out in the back was a big room made of logs that had obviously been added on but never finished because the logs had never been chinked. Stew Pot lifted his leg and put his mark on the side of it. Then we continued on, past a great big fenced area with a shed in it, past a spot where there’d once been a garden, and finally over to a ramshackle one-room log cabin that stood not far from the house. The door to this cabin lay flat on the dirt floor. Stew Pot’s grand tracking nose was going about ten miles a minute. He trotted in and stared up at a pack-rat’s twiggy nest in the rafters.

  Mam had just pulled back the tarp that covered our load. She flashed me a look that warned not to go poking about, but when Mr. McCloud ambled over she joined us.

  “This is the old homestead cabin,” Mr. McCloud said quietly, reaching out to touch a log wall as if he were stroking his favorite horse. “It was built by my great-grandparents before they built the big house. It’s been used for everything under the sun since then—as a schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, a henhouse, and now just a storage shed. One winter, back when I was a kid, it even housed an elk. She’d turned up in the middle of a blizzard, starving, and with a hurt leg. My mother pitched some hay into the cabin so the elk would be out of the storm. Well, after treatment like that, you’d better believe the elk turned up her nose and flat refused to leave. She lived there happily until the spring.”

  He fiddled with the rusty hinges where the door had once hung. I stepped into the almost-empty cabin and the two of us lifted the old battered door. Years of dust slid off as we propped it sideways against the log wall.

  “Thank you…,” he said, searching the air as he realized we hadn’t yet been introduced.

  “Blue,” I said. “Blue Gaspard. And my mom’s Maggie, but most everyone calls her Mam.”

  “Thank you, Miss Blue,” he said. He stuck out his hand and I shook it. He and my mom looked at each other. Neither one stuck out a hand. Then my mom reached out and Mr. McCloud touched the tips of her fingers with his. I’d never seen a finger shake before. It was almost as if they didn’t want to go through with that hand thing again.

  “My friends,” Mr. McCloud said gruffly, “just call me Mac.”

  “Mr. Mac,” I said, quickly counting myself as a friend, “I’m confused. We saw that sign when we came off the highway. No trespassing, it said, unless you’re a member of one of the tribes. But you aren’t … ?” I didn’t know how to put it.

  “Good question, Miss Blue,” he answered. “And you’re right. I’m not Native American. It’s mainly the Eastern Shoshones who live in this part of the reservation, here by the mountains. The Northern Arapaho came later, and ended up sharing the land. They settled to the east, in the flatlands. The two tribes were not exactly friends, you see, and even now there are still some hard feelings between them.”

  He pushed his hat low on his forehead as a gust of wind swirled by and looked at me from under the brim. “As for the trespassing, I’d better warn you that the sign meant what it said. There’s land back here that’s considered sacred—burial grounds and places where the Indians go on spirit quests and where the medicine men gather sacred herbs for their medicines. There are petroglyphs etched into sandstone cliffs all along the base of these mountains that are said to hold powerful medicine. The old-timers say these places are dangerous to go near. The lakes and rivers are guarded by water ghosts, or so they say. The mountains are watched over by the feared ninimbe, or little people. And to tell the truth, I’ve lived here long enough to actually believe some of these tales.”

  He ducked his head as if he felt a little silly owning up to this nonsense.

  Me, though, I shivered. I could almost feel eyes watching us, checking us out.

  “You can go beyond our fence line to clean out our ditch,” Mr. Mac continued, “and to get our appropriated water at the headgate up by the creek, but that’s about it. Unless you’re after one of our critters that has slipped through the fence, don’t go ridin’ out there on horseback. It might piss off the neighbors.” He scratched his chin and smiled. “Not that we have many out here…”

  Bummer, I thought. There went the horseback riding. If I did go exploring, I’d just have to sneak off on foot and be really careful not to get caught.

  “But, Mr. Mac,” I piped up, still confused. “If you’re not Indian, how’d you get this place right in the middle of Indian lands?”

  “Parcels of land here and there belong to non-Indians,” Mr. Mac said, his voice all hoarse and gravelly. “That’s what those of us who aren’t indigenous to this land are called, here on the rez. As for this ranch, my great-grandfather bought it from a Shoshone. I’m sure he paid nowhere near what it was worth. The history of how white men got hold of native lands is a long, heartbreaking story. Maybe you’ll learn more about this while you’re here.”

  Mr. Mac looked down at the ground, as if he was embarrassed by his own ancestors’ role in the history of these parts. He let out a sigh and looked up. Softly then, his words drifting skyward like a prayer, he said, “But I was born here, and to me this place is more precious than diamonds or gold.”

  Silently we walked back to the high-tall house. The clouds seemed near enough to reach up and touch. A herd of pronghorn antelopes stopped grazing on the hillsides to watch. An eagle circled above us. A moose jumped over a fence into a pasture where horses were grazing. A cow bellowed, and then another, and soon the valley echoed with calves answering back.

  I crawled onto the load in the back of Ol’ Yeller and started handing things down to my mom. She passed them on to Mr. Mac, who piled them onto the little front porch. Our canvas bags of boots and shoes. Our bedrolls. Two battered suitcases. Stew Pot’s monstrous fake-fur beanbag. The porch was getting full. We slowed down, waiting for Mr. Mac to open the front door.

  “I apologize for the mess you’ll find,” he said as he went up the porch steps. “I was … well, we were doing some remodeling. Didn’t quite get it done, as you’ll see.” He fumbled with a piece of baling wire that had been twisted around the doorknob and attached to a nail on the doorframe. “No need for locks aro
und here,” he said smiling. “This wire’s just for keepin’ the wind from blowing the door open.”

  And then, as if his words had stirred it up, a gust of wind swooped around the house and twirled his hat across the porch, past the cabin, and into the fields. We all scrambled after it and Stew Pot nearly nabbed it. I thought I’d captured the rascal, but it had other plans and took off spinning wildly again. It was my mom who finally caught it and held its brim down with the scuffed tip of her boot. Mr. Mac was hot on her heels, both of them breathless and laughing as they stooped to pick it up.

  For a second time that day my eyes practically popped out of their sockets. Something was going on with their lights. They swelled out and fluffed up around them like rosy pink clouds. I watched as the two of them looked away from each other, watched as their lights seemed to reel back in close to their bodies, as if they were trying to keep them safely tucked in.

  I’m such a snoop, but even I had to look away. Some things should really be private.

  They walked silently back to the house. My mom plucked a feather out of her hair and looked anywhere but at Mr. Mac. He looked straight ahead, brushing back his dark hair and cramming his rascally hat on his head.

  “Think I’d best leave you ladies to settle in,” he said, coughing and clearing his throat. “I’ll see you about the cattle and irrigating and the rest tomorrow. The pantry down in the cookhouse is full of canned goods, and the freezer’s well stocked. Help yourselves.” He opened the door to his truck, tipped his hat to us, and slid in.

  My mom and I stood silently, watching as the truck rumbled down toward the barn and disappeared behind the reddish gold shimmering trees.