Lifting the Sky (15 page)

“It must've been really hard on Mr. Mac,” I managed to say. “No… no wonder he's kind of abandoned the house.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And your dad? What about him?” I wanted to know.

“I never knew him. He was in an accident before I was born.”

“I… I'm sorry,” I said, feeling the words as I said them. At least I still had a dad, even if he wasn't around. I thought a moment. “But why aren't you with Rose now, up in Montana with the sculptor?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, his voice husky, almost a whisper. “Not long after she married Mr. McCloud, well, my grandpa died. So she handed me over to my grandma. My grandma's not well. I help her take care of her cows. And sometimes I go stay with my other grandma or my uncle at the fort or my relatives who ranch out by the Owl Creeks.”

I plopped down on the ground and hugged my knees to my chest. Shawn crouched on his heels. I felt like I should give something back in return.

“My dad took off, same as Rose,” I said, feeling my voice get all flat. “Only I don't know the reason why he left. I was almost five. He sent a few letters saying he was coming back, but he never did. It's been a long time now since we've heard from him. 'Course my mom hasn't exactly made it easy. She changes jobs about every two months. And I know something about alcohol problems too. My dad's got one, I think, or at least he used to, and my mom has to be really careful because if she takes one little drink she's hooked….”

My babbling trailed off. We sat there, two kids and a dog on a hill. Grown-ups could really complicate things. Mess up your life real good if you let them.

I picked up a rock. Shawn did too. I sat staring at mine while he tossed his from one hand to the other and then lobbed it over the hill. Mine was pinkish white, sparkly, and way too pretty to throw. I tossed it to Shawn. He snatched it, examined it, and stuck it into his shirt pocket. Then he nodded at me and stood up.

“That antelope fawn,” he said. “She okay?”

I got up too, brushing off my jeans and pushing my hair out of my face. I tucked the wisps under my cap. “She and her mother are both fine,” I said. “I'm worried though. I don't know if I should let the fawn out yet. Its leg doesn't seem to have gotten much better. What about the wolves? They still around? Did they get any more of your grandma's cows?”

“They got one of her dogs. That's what I came here to tell you. Watch out for your dog.” He reached out, gave
Pot's ear a tug, and walked to the ridge. Pot trotted after him. At the edge of the hill Shawn nodded at me and then put one hand on the rocky ledge and hopped over.

I watched as he loped down the steep, rocky back side of the hill. He had a chunky way of running, his feet hitting the ground hard, not light-footed at all. Rocks tumbled down to where his horse waited. Again the horse trotted to meet him, and he climbed on. As they galloped off Shawn looked back over his shoulder.

“Catch you next time,” he called.

Mam was already eating, an encyclopedia on the table beside her. She barely looked up when Stew Pot and I burst through the door. The kitchen smelled suspiciously of onions and garlic and something else. I pinched my nose.

“Stew's on the stove. Elk meat. It was in the freezer down at the cookhouse. Don't worry, it's mostly potatoes and carrots,” she said, and bowed her head again over her book.

“I made a friend, sort of,” I said, spooning the veggies into my bowl while trying to steer clear of the meat. “An Indian boy I bumped into up on the hill.”

I didn't mention that I'd run into him twice before and that he hadn't exactly been friendly. Or that he didn't like white girls, or whining girls, or white people, or whatever.

“Oh? That's good.” Mam put a finger on her place and looked up. “I'm glad you found a friend. I didn't think there was anyone around here for miles. And miles and
miles…” She smiled. “He live around here? What's his name?”

“Shawn, and I think he must live south or east of this place. His grandma has cows out on the tribal lands and he looks after them.”

“Sounds like a nice kid,” she said. She stuck her nose back in her book

I took a bite of stew and pushed a hunk of meat to one side of my mouth. I held the lump in my cheek. Pretended to swallow. Coughed and spit the lump into my napkin. It's a trick that never works. Mam looked up and frowned.

So without thinking I burst out with the news.

“I also found out that Mr. Mac was married to Shawn's aunt. Her name was Rose, and she used to live here in this house. They must've been fixing it up, painting and making the house bigger by adding on to it. You know what? I bet they were planning to have a baby, because that's what that other bedroom with the half-finished mural and those paint cans in it would've been for. And then she just up and left him”—I snapped my fingers—“like
that
.”

Mam put her hand to her head as if something heavy had fallen out of the sky and hit her. “How awful,” she said. “He must've been so…” She let the words trail away.

Heartbroken
, I thought. Of course she knew how Mr. Mac had felt. I remembered how, after my dad went away, the silence had grown until it filled the room and then our whole universe.

“I don't know …,” she said, staring up through the ceiling and out to someplace far beyond it.

I stirred my bowl of stew, lifting a spoonful of the mush of brown potatoes and carrots, eyeing it suspiciously. I couldn't think of any words to fill up the long silence without making things worse.

“It hasn't been easy, living here,” she finally said. “The worst part is that we're so far off the road and, except for that boy you just met, you don't have any friends. I wouldn't want to just run out on Mr. McCloud, leave him in a fix, but I don't know…. This place somehow just seems so… sad.”

“But it's been a long time,” I said, my words tumbling over each other now in their rush to get out. “Almost three years since the house had been lived in, that's what Mr. Mac said.”

“I don't know …,” Mam said again. She put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands.

“But I do,” I said. “I'm sure of it. I'm already fixing up the log addition. Next time Mr. Mac comes out, we'll surprise him.”
If only he'll come in,
I thought to myself.

Another silence filled the room. My mom's rough hands fiddled with the pages of her book—the old, out-of-date encyclopedia she studied so hard, trying to make up for the schooling she'd missed. A lump grew in my throat that had nothing to do with the stew.

“We'll stay till you finish what you're doing. After that, I can't promise. It all depends on…” She bit her lip. “Never mind,” she said.

Depends on what? I wondered. Mr. McCloud? Her own loneliness? Or the possibility that my dad might
miraculously find us? Or was it just that we'd about reached the end of her staying point, the time when she almost automatically started to think about moving on.

I slipped my bowl under the table. Pot cleaned it up. I made me a peanut butter and banana and honey sandwich and took it up to my room. It was my favorite thing in the world. Comfort food, Mam always called it.

That night I woke to the sound of cows mooing and stirring about. I ran to the window to see what was disturbing them, but clouds hid the sliver of moon. Nothing howled, nothing cried out, so I slipped back into my dreams.

I woke before sunrise and crept barefooted down to the kitchen. No Stew Pot, no Mam. I figured they'd already gone out. I grabbed my radio and headed for the log addon and turned on the light.

Rising from the scraps of beaver-peeled sticks and river willows stood two rickety chairs and a small table. The table hardly wobbled if I propped it up in a corner. There'd been four chairs, but the first two had collapsed.

No wonder. It wasn't as easy as I'd thought, making furniture. Especially trying to get all four legs to touch the ground, and making it strong enough to actually use. The hardest thing was trying to keep things more or less square.

I thought I'd weave some feathers into the backs to
pretty them up, and some treasures too, like a few white bones or some of those shiny smooth stones from the hill where I got my chink. I still had a lot to do.

And the chinking was really coming along, although you could tell where I'd started, not sure of what I was doing, and where I'd finally more or less figured it out.

I slopped water into my purple-clay-bits-of-straw-chink-mix and stirred. Only half a wall left to do! But why hurry? We'd stay at Far Canyon until I finished the room. That's what Mam had said, right?

I should take my time, then. We'd been here six weeks plus a day—but then, who was counting? I wondered if not wanting to let Mr. Mac down was enough to make her stay on. “It all depends,” she'd said. “No promises.” Each time we'd left in the past, she'd given me not one word of warning. I knew better than to count on promises. Frankly, I'd thought she'd been really lucky to get this job like she had, and if I'd been her I'd have hung on to it tight as I could. It was a wonder any ranch ever hired her, what with no references and no recommendations at all. Sometimes, from the sideways glances we got when she drove into a ranch looking for work, I suspected the word had been passed along that she was a fantastic hand but not one to be depended on for the long haul.

I wiped at the dribbles on the line of chink I'd just finished. On the radio the flute music stopped and a steady fast drumming started. I threw down my trowel and skipped barefooted outside. The sun was just peeking over the hills and the sky was the color of raspberries.

“Wake up, world!” I shouted. “It's the summer solstice, the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year!”

“Part of the world has already been up for hours.” It was my mom, tromping around the corner of the house wiping her forehead with her sleeve and looking as if she'd already done a day's work.

“We've got a fence down,” she said. “I've already put out six strays and brought back a few of our own that got out. I put them in at a gate, but I suspect the break's up at the top of that hill.” She pointed toward the hill where I'd found the clay for my chink. “Get your chores done and we'll head up there. I'd like to ride but that's not a hill for a horse.”

Pretty quick we were winding our way up the hill, me clutching fencing pliers and a sack of staples and Mam hoisting a small roll of barbed wire and the stretchers. I'd never climbed this hill. Trees lined the top of it, but on the side nothing grew. It looked like a moonscape with its steep twisted slopes and purple-and-cream-colored clay. I skipped ahead, drumming a tune on the staple sack with my pliers.

“You look like you're floating on a cloud,” Mam said as she scrambled up the hillside behind me.

And I was. I was in heaven, up here in the Winds, as these mountains are called, as if they're some wispy place in the sky.

“Always do some detective work when you're out fixin' fences,” I said when we got to the top and spied the downed fence. By the look of the hair in the wires and the scat, a big herd of elk had passed through.

I whistled and Mam hummed while we worked, while Stew Pot sniffed about trying to scare up some rabbits and chipmunks. We gathered up the broken ends of the wire and spliced them together. I handed Mam staples and she hammered them into the wood posts as we tightened the drooping wires. We strung out more wire where the old fence couldn't be mended. The sun scooted halfway up the sky and then seemed to sit there, not moving. All around us the world glistened and glowed.

We got the job done and were halfway down the steepest part of the hill, checking the fence that ran practically straight up and down, when I suddenly stopped. I looked around at the ground and then pried out two staples from a wood post and loosened two wires instead of making them tighter.

Mam glared at me as if I'd lost my mind. “What on
earth
are you doing?” she asked.

I pointed to the bare earth. A trail used by wild animals passed along the steep hillside and then under the fence. “I'm just making it easier for the animals to get through,” Isaid.

“We've got a fence that didn't need fixin' and here you've taken it apart.”

“But the trail here glows!” I said. “Don't you see the way this trail is
different
?” A hazy line of light floated on top of the trail like the silky thread of a spider, only thick and gauzy and the color of a smoky crystal. It stretched out straight past my hill and on into the mountains. Other straight silvery trails joined with it, and they all met and
formed a shimmering star. Other lines headed west and I lost them, though from a faraway canyon I could see light shining up from what appeared to be a huge star. Whatever these lines were, the animals knew about them because some of their trails closely followed the lines.

Mam scratched her head as she stared at the animal trail. “Can't see a thing,” she said, “except for that fence you just mangled.”

“It's like fairy trails across the landscape that meet up and make a big star. I don't know why I've never noticed them before,” I said, waving my hand. “Maybe these lines can be seen only under special conditions. Maybe it's something about the light today on the summer solstice….”

Mam rolled her eyes. “What I think is that you'd better fix that fence back like it was, young lady,” she said.

Somewhere, I remembered reading about something called “ley lines.” They were lines of energy that led to power centers, or to ancient sites. I stared at the place in the mountains where the lines all met up. If I never got to see them again, at least I'd remember the high pink sandstone cliff near where the lines formed a silvery star. A gray landslide scarred the pink cliff. In my head I marked where the star blazed up from the valley off to the west.