Lifting the Sky Read online

  I got that nervous feeling again. What do I know about taking care of a broken leg? I wanted to say. Or feeding two bums that can’t even stand up to suck? But what I said was “I can handle it.” They were Mam’s and my favorite words.

  Mr. Mac let himself out of the pen. He climbed into his truck and started the engine. “Now, don’t get upset if these bums don’t make it,” he said. “I don’t think they have much of a chance.”

  “But I do,” I said, though he’d already chugged down the road.

  Chapter Six

  Both bums were black, but one had a white clover-shaped mark on her forehead. I named that one Lucky Charm. The one with the broken leg I dubbed Wonder Baby. It turned out to be just the right name.

  I stood with my hands on my hips looking down at my grubby orphans. It was clear their poor mama hadn’t had time to give them more than a quick lick and a kiss before she took her last breath. Now that their tummies were full, what they needed most was a bit of a cleanup. I grabbed some old towels from the house, filled a bucket with warm soapy water, and lugged it back to the pen. I wiped their snotty noses and then rubbed their little bodies with the towels.

  I was taking a break, watching two crows dive-bomb and squawk at a hawk, when Wonder Baby made a strange gurgling sound and her lights started growing dimmer and dimmer, as if she were fading away.

  What was I supposed to do? Give mouth-to-mouth? How? Mr. Mac! Help!

  But he wasn’t there. No one was—it was all up to me! Frantically I pushed with both hands on her chest. I remembered how the bums’ lights had brightened as Mr. Mac stroked them down in the barn. I stared down at my own shaky hands. Could I do that?

  They didn’t look as if they held enough light to make anything brighter at all.

  How do I fill up on light? I took in a humongous breath. It’s a wonder my lungs didn’t pop, sucking in all that air and space and vacuuming in whole shafts of sunlight. All the while I kept imagining everything churning inside me and turning itself into light, and then with a big whoosh I let it all out. “Let Wonder Baby’s lights come back on,” I whispered, and I stuck both hands on my little bum’s chest.

  Her body twitched. Her lights fluttered. “Hang in there,” I pleaded. I watched as her lights grew fainter and then just as suddenly they flared up the same way a spark does when you blow hard and it catches on fire.

  “Yes!” I said.

  Wonder Baby lifted her head. “Maaaaa,” she said.

  I stared at my hands. They glowed as if they were on fire.

  The whole rest of the day I spent with my bums, puzzling over what had happened. I didn’t go down to the barn or off to explore. I didn’t do one page of schoolwork.

  The sun was sneaking down behind the high mountains when Stew Pot showed up all droopy and feeling left out. He looked up at me with sad eyes. I touched my forehead to his.

  “Stew Pot,” I said, “please understand. It’s very, very important that we take good care of these calves.” I rubbed Pot’s ears for a long time before I went on.

  “I get the feeling there’s something really special about this place because for some reason I’m seeing lights all over the place. And today, Pot, I think I used my own lights to make Wonder Baby’s lights brighter. I don’t know how that happened. But it made me think … I think I need to do everything possible to get Mam to stay here awhile.”

  Pot cocked his ears at the sound of Ol’ Yeller rumbling up from the barn, and pretty quick Mam showed up at the pen. She leaned on the gate and peered at the calves and then nodded as if things looked okay. But all she said was, “Clear sky tonight. It’s cold in these mountains, so it could drop down to freezing. Better bring your bums into the house.”

  My mom could be such a pain in the neck, but sometimes I so dearly loved her.

  While she stoked up the furnace, I pushed the couch and a trunk and some chairs into a holding pen, right in the living room, beside the warm grate. When Mam came up from the cellar she smiled as if I’d done just right. Then together we carried the tiny bums into the house.

  That night I lugged Stew Pot’s beanbag bed downstairs and spread out my bedroll so the two of us could sleep near my babies.

  Around noontime the next day I ran down to the barn to catch Mr. Mac before he took off for the main ranch. The last two heifers had calved. He’d spent the morning showing my mom all the ropes, explaining the lay of the land and how the ditches were laid out.

  “Little rascals could keep you busy full-time,” I heard him telling her as I got to the barn. “Used to have one hand who I’d swear did nothing but set traps, and when that didn’t work he’d blow up the darn things with dynamite.”

  I puzzled over that before it struck me that it had to be beavers he was talking about.

  Mr. Mac was already loading his gear into the back of the truck. “I was about to quit raising cattle on this place,” he said as he hoisted his saddle over the side. Then he grabbed his rope, tossed out one end of it, coiled a loop, tossed it, and coiled it again. Mam and I stood there silently watching.

  “These past few years I turned the place over to the hired hands to handle,” he continued, tucking the coiled rope into the truck next to his saddle. “That was the wrong thing to do.”

  Mam flipped her hair the way a horse does its tail when it’s got a bit of an attitude. She stared somewhere around Mr. Mac’s middle shirt button.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean to say that you couldn’t handle it,” he apologized, though of course she hadn’t opened her mouth.

  “Obviously I haven’t been around near enough, as you can see from the state things are in. The beavers are building dams to beat hell and plugging up about half of our water. The ditches are in terrible shape, and the fences are even worse, what with moose and elk and stray cattle fence jumping to get to our irrigated pastures. And then there’s the stuff you can’t do a thing about, like the drought. Wyoming’s been short of moisture for eight years in a row. The creeks are running low, there’s not enough feed for the wildlife, and the fire danger—don’t get me started on that! We used to clear the ditches by burning the weeds, but not anymore. One spark could set the whole county on fire.”

  Mam and I followed his gaze as he stared at the mountains behind us. The thick forest of green fir and pine trees was peppered with rusty brown patches of beetle-killed trees. Everyone in Wyoming knew about the beetles that bored into the bark of pine trees and were slowly but surely killing them dead.

  Mr. Mac sighed. “So with all that, and now the wolves that are spreading out of the park—not that I’ve seen any of those around here, at least not yet—well, this might be the last year I try to ranch here.”

  He turned to my mom. “Unless, of course, things work out and I find the right hand to handle all this.”

  Mam’s eyes moved up from his middle button. For a minute they stared at each other. She said nothing.

  Sometimes I just purely wanted to shake her.

  “Well, we’ll see how it goes,” Mr. Mac said, and he climbed into his truck. As the diesel motor rumbled he rolled down the window. “Call if you need anything,” he said. “Phone’s pretty staticky out here, but it usually works. Stay out of trouble, Miss Blue, and let me know how it goes with those calves. Be sure to keep a good watch on that leg. Don’t let it get infected. The cast will need changing as the calf grows. It will take quite a while for a break like that to heal.”

  He tipped his hat. “Stay safe,” he said.

  He and my mom looked at each other. I looked away. Pretty quick the truck went lurching across the shaky bridge and in two seconds flat the trees on the other side of the creek had swallowed it up. When we could no longer hear the chug of his truck the huge silence of the place settled in.

  Chapter Seven

  “Enough is enough,” Mam said after three nights of bums hanging out in the living room.

  Lucky Charm and Wonder Baby left behind—well, what calves leave behind. Each morning I hauled them back to
their pen as soon as the sun wobbled up. A blustery wind had whirled in from the east and at night it got down below freezing, and so each evening we carried them back into the house.

  When I came back from the pen that morning carrying two empty milk bottles, I found Mam scraping oatmeal into three bowls. She set two on the table and one on the floor and plunked herself down at the table. Stew Pot stuck his nose in his bowl and then lay with his head on his paws looking mournful. Mam puckered her brow and stared at her bowl.

  I handed her a spoon. Placed a carton of milk on the table. “Eat,” I said.

  Giving me a crooked half grin, she stuck her spoon into the thick gluey concoction. She’d left the pot simmering on the stove when she’d taken off before dawn. I’d been so busy getting the bums out of the house and fed and cleaned up that I hadn’t even glanced at the stove. Now here it was, a little past seven, and she’d already been out and about for two hours. Since Mr. Mac left she’d been bustling about as if the world would shatter and break if she didn’t get the meadows dragged and the ditches cleared before snowmelt in the mountains, and the fences all fixed before the Indian cows got put out on the tribe’s grazing lands. She’d barely taken time out to sleep, much less to cook or to eat. I wished she’d take better care of herself. Sometimes I wondered if all kids who had only one parent worried about that. Like, what would happen to me if something should happen to her?

  “I’d be totally thrilled to help out,” I said as I rinsed out the bottles and scrubbed the nipples and then plopped them into the drainer. “I could hike along the fences to see where they’re down, or I could clear some of the brush from the ditches.”

  To be truthful, that wasn’t just me being Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I was itching to get out there. Caring for the bums and doing my schoolwork had eaten up all my free time. I hadn’t had one single chance to go off and explore.

  “Not till your schoolwork’s mailed back.” She said that without a lick of responsibility in her voice.

  And just who was it who’d busted me out of school, please?

  “But,” she added, “the calves are a handful and you’re doing a fantastic job.”

  Just butter me up. “Well, I could at least take care of the housework,” I heard myself say. “And maybe even some of the cooking.” Which, trust me, wasn’t like me at all. Volunteer? For indoor jobs? Cooking?

  Mam brought the glob in her spoon to her mouth. She glanced down at Stew Pot, who still hadn’t touched his bowl of oatmeal. She took a bite of hers, wrinkled her nose, crossed her eyes, and slammed her spoon down on the table.

  “Deal,” she said.

  That’s how it started. How I began to take over the house.

  It was Sunday. With no lessons, and with my bums already taken care of, I got going on windows. All fourteen of them, count them, inside and out, except for the outside of the two in the attic that were too high for the ladder to reach.

  I scrubbed and wiped and polished and when I was done I ran out into the meadows and stood with my hands on my hips looking back at the house. No more blank-looking, grimy, sad-eyed windows, no sir. The eyes of this house sparkled.

  Seeing it with its windows glistening in the sunlight made me wonder why Mr. Mac had left the house. Whatever the reason, it had worked out for the better for Mam and me. It was as if the house had just been sitting there waiting for us to come bring it back to life.

  I wondered if by putting it down on paper, by drawing it—this deserted house and the wild landscape around it—by seeing it in my mind’s eye so clearly, by imagining it to be solid and real, had I somehow, some way, drawn it to me?

  Could the universe possibly work that way?

  It was right then, standing there in the meadow, that I got a really bright idea. Maybe, if I fixed it up a bit, I could make my dream house more—well, more mine. More … permanent. As in something that lasted for more than two months.

  Slowly I walked back to the house. It seemed to have its own faint glow, like a slight shimmer that might, or might not, have been the sun bouncing off the newly washed windows.

  I dusted the bookshelves and captured six spiders and carefully put them outside. I danced with the broom to some cool Indian rap and only broke two plates that had been set too close to the edge of the table. I poked about in the drawers and cabinets and pulled out a tablecloth. It was the most gorgeous rose-patterned cloth I’d ever seen. We’d use it just once, I decided. I cleared off the table—schoolbooks and notebooks and encyclopedias and gloves and fencing pliers and a pile of rusty fence staples. I shook out the cloth and spread it, wondering about what special, happy occasions the cloth had been spread on the table like this. When I stood back and smiled at my blue-forme kitchen, it seemed as if it smiled back.

  That afternoon I ran down to the bunkhouse to check out the pantry.

  Oh my. Shelf after shelf of all sorts of goodies stared me right in the eyes as if daring me. The freezer was jam-packed full of packages of elk and beef and I even found several gallons of ice cream. But believe you me, I was careful. I brought up to the house only what I thought we might need for a day. Honestly, all I slipped into the cardboard box under my bed were two cans of tomato soup and one small jar of pickle relish. And one little tube of something called anchovy paste.

  I wasn’t much of a cook, but then Mam wasn’t much of a critic. For supper I made spaghetti with peanut-butter-flavored veggie sauce for Stew Pot and me, and a meat sauce for Mam. I even mixed up a cake and spread it with peanut butter and coconut icing. It made it look like a party with everything spread out on the pretty cloth, although my mom thought we’d better put it away again right after supper. Mam said it was the best meal she’d eaten in ages. She also said thanks a lot, but she wasn’t so tired that she couldn’t do the cooking from now on.

  Ever since I can remember the two of us almost never sat down to a meal without something to read. Me, I was deep into a book about Indians, homed in on a part about how they showed how courageous they were by reaching out and touching the enemy, a practice called “counting coup.” It seemed like a nifty idea because it would sure take a lot more guts to do that than to just shoot someone from far off. As for Mam, she had her nose buried in an encyclopedia. “I’m going to get through the whole set,” she said.

  There were twenty-six books. How much time would that give us? When she wasn’t so tired that she couldn’t see straight she could read a regular-sized book in one evening. I’d already caught her skipping from A to M and then peeking at Z. I’d have to keep track. Not that getting through the set would be reason enough for her to stay in one place. But at least it was something I could pin a few hopes on. “Have another,” I could always say. “Surely you haven’t yet read all of T….”

  Up in my attic, after the dishes were washed and put away, and after my mom had trailed off to bed lugging two heavy volumes, I opened my journal. I’d missed several days, so I searched for the date in the little calendar in the back. Sunday, it said. May 13.

  I jumped out of bed. “Happy Mother’s Day, Mam,” I yelled down through the hole in the floor.

  Chapter Eight

  I practically lived with my bums. Some nights I found myself out in the shed, not sure how I got down the steep attic stairs and out the front door without waking. I’d curl up with Lucky Charm and Wonder Baby and wake only when the sun tipped over the mountains and spilled its light into the valley. Then I’d stumble to the kitchen, mix up two bottles of milk, and head back and feed my babies.

  Both calves had gotten strong enough to stand up and suck on a bottle. Just try holding a squirming wobbly-legged calf between your knees to feed it. And of course be sure you hold on to the bottle with both hands ’cause otherwise it’ll get jerked this way and that and the nipple will shoot off and you’ll both take a bath in the calf’s milk. Try to keep calf number two from butting in while this is going on—see what happens.

  I smelled like sour milk. Even Pot turned up his nose when I passed.


  Lucky Charm’s lights had brightened up right away. Wonder Baby’s—well, her lights had perked up after that first day when I’d been afraid she might not make it. She stumbled and clunked about with her casted leg and even managed a few hippity hops, but then sometimes she’d fall down and stay that way until I picked her up.

  I chanted their names as I stroked them, and while I stoked them I concentrated on the light in my fingers. It didn’t take long to catch on that I didn’t have to puff myself up like a blowfish or even actually touch them to make the lights grow bigger. Just holding my hands above them and thinking about what I wanted to do seemed to be enough to make light flow gently out of my fingers.

  My hands even started picking up things that my eyes didn’t catch. On Thursday morning, one week after I got the two calves, I noticed a prickly tingle poking at my hands as I was checking Wonder Baby’s leg. I moved my hands back and forth through the air. That was strange. I could feel bulges and tingles and odd bumpy places. It was the same sort of feeling you’d get if you stuck your hand out the truck window and felt the wind pushing against it.

  The thing to do, I figured, was to smooth those rough places out. But how?

  I leaned my head down and blew at the airy bumps. I blew till I almost passed out, then felt around in the air above the calf’s leg. The bumps were still there. I scratched over them by crooking my fingers and then dragging them through the lumpy air. I noticed that doing that seemed to smooth out the bumps, so I raked and scraped the air above Wonder Baby’s body till the lumpy air and the tingles and prickles dwindled away to nothing.

  Wonder Baby snored. Somehow, I’d banished the bumps. I’d also put her to sleep, so I slipped off her cast and examined the break. It didn’t seem worse, but then again, it didn’t seem better. Cripes, I thought. If it wasn’t such a long ride to the highway, I’d ask Mam to take her to a vet to get it checked out.