Lifting the Sky (14 page)

All of a sudden she slapped the steering wheel and hooted with laughter. “That story,” she whooped. “I bet it gets wilder each time it gets told! If they'd only seen the whole thing—weren't we a sight!”

It took only a split second before I caught the bug. Mam always said I cackled like a coop full of hens laying
eggs, so now I flapped my arms and crowed and the two of us laughed hysterically. For some reason I had the strangest feeling that our laughing was almost like crying, and once started with either we might never stop. I let myself laugh even harder. It was a long time before our laughing dropped off into hiccups and snorts.

Mam wiped her eyes. “On the serious side,” she said—which only set us off again. She tried once more. “On the serious and totally humorless side,” she said, “seeing how much the creek has dropped it does seem likely that we might run short of water….”

Her words made us sober up fast. I knew what “running short” meant—use it or lose it. If the water got lower than our headgate on the creek, we'd be in trouble. And the beavers didn't help the situation one bit since the water they kept damming up irrigated one whole side of the ranch. The summer before, we'd been at a ranch where the creek and the well had run dry. I doubted it would be that bad up here in the mountains, but who could predict what would happen if we didn't get any rain?

So that very day Mam and I made a deal. I'd attack the beaver ponds every day with her blessing, while she took on the ditches. We'd irrigate the heck out of those fields. And if we ran out of water later, well, at least we'd have made good use of it while we'd had it.

So, what with running back and forth to the ponds and doing house chores and weeding our garden and working on my Blooming Room and checking every few hours on the state of my fawn and feeding my bums, I kept so
busy I hardly had time to even
think
about my dad or that Indian kid.

Or at least I tried not to. But when my hands are busy my mind's usually off doing its own thing.

I'd be peeking through the cabin window, watching as Lone One bent into a comma and licked her fawn as it nursed. Somehow Shawn would wiggle his way into my thoughts.

I mean, this kid had almost bitten my head off. For sure he didn't act like a saint or anyone special, though he'd practically put Stew Pot under his spell. So why did his lights shine as if he had a star blazing out of his chest?

I'd only once seen someone with lights almost as bright white as Shawn's. That hadn't been a priest or a holy person—it was an old gray-haired woman mopping the floor at a rest station. She'd wrung out her mop and looked over at me and smiled.
Pow!
A bright white light flashed across the bathroom. I felt as if I'd been filled to bursting with sweetness and light and something I could only call love.

Shawn's lights had been even brighter. How could that be? I must've seen wrong—had dust in my eyes, or stardust or something.

I'd be at the ponds, undoing the beaver dams and sorting out the neatest beaver-trimmed sticks to take back to the ranch for the chairs and tables I was making. Or trying to make. Then I'd sit on the dam with my boots in the icy cold water and throw sticks for Stew Pot to fetch.

I'd be in my Blooming Room, twisting willows to
nail onto beaver-gnawed sticks to make a chair—okay, a
really
strange-looking chair. And all the while I'd be wondering,
What would it be like
not
to see the lights? Would night be as dark as black ink if you couldn't see the light from your own body or the soft glow of the dog sleeping beside you?

Do we all make up our minds about people based on the lights that surround them? What if you just saw a body and not the colors rippling and flashing around it?

But how would people know to be wary if they couldn't see warning signs like flashing red lights or dark clouds building up or yucky pea-soup green swirling around certain people? By intuition, I supposed … Though even I didn't always act on what I saw. Like with that rancher Mam had worked for at her last job. I'd seen the way his lights reached out like tentacles to touch her as if he were an octopus and she a little fish. I knew I should've warned her about him, but I'd kept my mouth shut because she'd needed the job.

I felt my face turn red. I'd also wanted to just stay
put.
I'd had more than one reason for keeping my mouth shut.

I grabbed my hammer and pounded so hard that the willow sticks I was nailing together split right in two. I grabbed more sticks out of the pile beside me and, using the big garden cutters, cut them to size. I tossed the broken sticks into my trash heap and sat staring at the bits of willows and slivers of bark and sawdust and bent nails.

I'd seen how I could change the colors of the light coming out of my hands, and how I could make the lights
brighter. Or not. It amazed me, the lights I was now able to see. But it was scary, too. Bad thoughts seemed to reach out the same way that good ones did. If love reached out to touch a loved one, would hate do the same? And jealousy? Anger? Sadness?

I thought of Mr. McCloud and his nice, bright rainbow lights. Some lights I was drawn to like a moth. Others I tried to steer clear of. Like that blustery man who'd blasted into the trading post.

All of a sudden I remembered. A drawing. I couldn't have been quite five when I'd done it.

I dropped willow sticks and hammer—
clunk
—on the floor, then sprinted up to my attic. I reached under my bed and pushed my just-in-case box aside, making the cans in it rattle. I yanked out my suitcase. In a pocket inside the lid I kept my old journals—six packets of them, each tied with a blue ribbon. I grabbed the lot up and dumped them all on my bed. I picked up the packet holding the two most tattered journals.

It'd been years since I'd untied the ribbon and leafed through them. I'd been hardly more than four when I first started drawing in a journal. Mam had encouraged me to keep at it, and I had. They were filled with squiggly drawings, with tattered leaves and crushed flowers and old rodeo tickets Scotch taped into them. I shuffled through the pages till I found what I'd been looking for—the memory that'd been hiding away in the back of my mind.

The picture I'd been looking for showed a pair of
cowboy boots with stars on their heels. For someone not quite five I'd put a lot of work into drawing the spurs and the fancy stitching on the sides of the boots and their sharp pointed toes. Near the top of the page, the boots were cut off by a long wavy line. On the floor beside the boots was a bottle turned on its side. Angry-looking black and red scribbles covered the rest of the page up to the wavy line and past it.

“Oh no,” I whispered.

It was the view I'd had from under the bed. The cowboy boots, partly hidden by the bedspread. The bottle pointing under the bed at four-year-old me hiding there.

It all came back in a rush, as if the picture I'd drawn carried its own scary light. How I'd heard the bottle rolling across the wood floor and the boots stomping and my mom's voice crying, “Don't! Please don't!” And even though I'd squeezed my eyes shut I'd still seen through closed eyelids the red flashes of light and it was all jumbled together with my mom's soft crying as the boots stomped and the door banged with a whoosh of air that'd sent moth wings and dust bunnies flying.

The thing about memories you've blanked out is that there must've been a really good reason why you'd done that. I almost didn't want to turn any more pages. But I did, and I grinned when I saw what I'd drawn.

A bed again. Another little me, but this time a smiley face peeking out of the covers, along with the round teddy-bear face of old Grub. A tall, sticklike man stood by
the bed with his arms stretched up over his head. I'd drawn zigzags of blue coming out of his hands and his head was lit up like a bright yellow lightbulb.

It was my dad telling me stories. I'd drawn this after the one he'd told about how I was so special that the whole country of France celebrated my birthday. On my birthday everyone danced in the streets and the night would be lit up with fireworks. Then he'd jump up and excitedly throw out his arms, shaking his fingers and dancing about to show firecrackers exploding up in the sky. I'd seen sparkly lights flicking out of his hands and I'd laughed at his magic.

I flipped the page. A tall stick-figure man with a black hat stood with both hands held out toward a big red shape with four legs that must've been meant for a horse. I'd taken a green crayon and made the hands green, and scribbled green and yellow all around the man and the horse. I must have watched him work on a horse and seen light shooting out from his hands.

I sat on my bed for the longest time feeling all soft and open, like a turtle that had suddenly lost its hard shell. Had I had any idea what I was drawing back then? Because it was only now, since the lights had come back so much more brilliantly, that the drawings made any sense.

Somehow, almost every afternoon I found some excuse to climb up to my tree. Shawn never showed up. I always felt just a tiny bit disappointed.

My tree bloomed, and not just with buds, though it was
loaded with greenish blue berries. It bloomed with the feathers from a crow and a great horned owl and the tiny skull of a chipmunk. It blossomed with long blue ribbons and a tuft of antelope hair and a fossil shell found in the creek, and with some strange shiny oval-shaped stones that I'd found on the hill where I got the clay to make chink.

Each time I climbed the hill as warily as if I had antennae poking out of my head feeling about for what might be lurking or hiding up there. No matter that Stew Pot always ran ahead. How could I depend on a dog who wouldn't warn me if a certain someone was there?

I could always feel the energy of the tree before I got to it. Then one late afternoon I felt something
other.
I crept up, keeping low to the ground.

I saw a hand reach out of the dark shadows of the tree. The hand glowed. It touched a blue ribbon and then fell back into the shadows.

Was Shawn purposely hiding to startle me? I scowled at Stew Pot, who sat panting in the shadows beside him.

I stopped creeping around and marched over. Shawn didn't say hello. He glanced at the ribbon and then at me. His silence only made me feel cranky. Pot's sickly sweet grin didn't help.

Well, okay, and hello to you too
, I thought.

“So what is it?” I asked huffily, still out of breath from my climb. “You mad about me trespassing or sticking stuff in the tree, or what?”

Shawn looked startled by my outburst, but he just blinked and lifted one shoulder like, “Take your pick.”

I turned away and stared down at the ranch. Behind me I heard him say, “Maybe I just don't like whi—” He stopped.

I spun. “What is it you don't like?” I asked, staring straight into his eyes. “Whining girls? Or
white
girls? White
people
?”

Shawn looked me in the eyes too. “Maybe all three,” he said. “It's a problem I'm working on.”

“Well, maybe I don't like Indian boys. I've never known one before, so I don't really know,” I said.

“I like your dog,” Shawn said, his voice very serious, as if this was important. He reached down to scratch Pot's ears just as Pot stuck out his paw.

“Well, my dog's pretty particular. I can't figure out why he likes you. Up till now I thought he was smart.”

I blew the hair off my forehead. How was that for a great start? Well, he hadn't exactly been friendly, but my own lousy humor hadn't helped. And it
was
his turf I was trespassing on.

Shawn stepped out of the shadows and, I couldn't help it, I stared. He wore an electric-blue shirt and he glowed like he'd gulped down a star. I watched the show of bright yellow flashing in the colors dancing around him. He had lots of thoughts floating about.

He took a few steps away from me toward the rim. For a moment I thought he was going to hop over and leave, but he turned back and cocked his head and looked at me as if I presented some kind of problem. He kicked a rock
around with his boot, then picked it up and tossed it from one hand to the other.

“You live in the big house,” he suddenly said. It wasn't a question.

“Yeah, I do,” I nodded. “The house hadn't been lived in for several years.”

“It'll be three years come August. I know. My aunt used to live there. I did too, for a while.”

My eyebrows shot up. He could've said he'd just come down from the moon and I wouldn't have been more surprised. For once I didn't know what to say. “Wi—with your aunt?” I stammered. “You
did
? Why?”

Shawn grew very still. “Because she was married to Mr. McCloud,” he said.

I shook my head to clear it. “But … why were you with your aunt instead of your mother?” I asked, mystified.

Shawn clenched the rock in his fist. “I don't usually talk about this kind of stuff. Don't ever, actually.” He lowered his eyes and then looked straight at me. “But since you asked, my mom had problems. Still has. Drugs. Drinking too much. The usual. So she handed me over to her sister Rose soon after I was born. It's the Indian way. Nothing unusual about that. And later, when my aunt married Mr. Mac and moved here, I came along too.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. One day she just left.”

“Just
left
? Why? Where'd she go? She and Mr. Mac—were they…?”

“I thought they were happy. I guess everyone did. At least till she took off with a sculptor from up on the Crow Reservation in Montana.”

“Cripes,” I said. “A sculptor. What does he sculpt?” As if that mattered one bit, but I was so flustered I hardly knew what to say.

Shawn shrugged. “Buffalos. Bears. Big stuff. Indian warriors on horseback. Bronzes. Museums are buying them up.”