Lifting the Sky (2 page)

“This one sounds bearable,” I mumbled as I took a bite of my eggs and slipped the rest into my napkin. I didn't want to sound too excited, and besides, I was still in a
huff. But to myself I was thinking,
That's perfect—it fits her exactly,
and I crossed my fingers for luck.

My mom quickly finished her breakfast and slipped a five-dollar bill under her cup. The tip was almost as much as our breakfast had cost. I knew she'd tip her last dime without a thought as to how the next one might appear. She never seemed to worry about where her next paycheck might come from. She'd even joke that the reason she was always running from one job to the next was because she was fleeing her demons.

But believe me, it was no joke to
me
.

“Every exit's an entrance to someplace else,” she said now. She got up and tore out the ad and tucked it into her pocket. I stuffed the last of my toast into my napkin along with my scrambled eggs and snitched eight packets of jam from the next table. Just in case. On the way out I crammed six peppermint candies into my pocket and smiled sweetly at the cashier as I followed my mom to the truck.

We asked around and found out that the ranch was on the reservation way up in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains. We got directions and headed on up there, didn't even call or anything. My mom doesn't like phones any more than she likes unnecessary words. She says I talk more than enough for the two of us.

We'd hardly turned off the highway and onto a rutted dirt road when we came to a sign. We jolted to a stop and read it.

TRIBAL LANDS
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING
BEYOND THIS POINT

The small print said it was Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal Land and that you had to be a
member of one of the tribes to go on. No hunting, no fishing, and a big humongous fine for picking up artifacts.

I got the feeling the sign meant what it said.

“What now?” I moaned. “This
has
to be the right road. Unless we've been sent on a wild-goose chase.”

From the looks of things it sure could've been possible. The two-track road crooked over the hills toward the mountains. One ranch peeked out of the hills on our right, but otherwise there was nothing but sage-covered hills stretching out till they butted into steep rosy cliffs and high snowcapped mountains. Junipers dotted the hillsides and still-leafless aspens and cottonwoods followed the curves of a creek.

My heart gave a lurch. It looked strangely familiar.

My mom shrugged and put the truck into four-wheel drive, passed the sign, and kept on going, dodging rocks and boulders, splashing through puddles and lurching over shaky bridges that crossed and recrossed a wide shallow creek until finally—after eight miles that felt like a hundred and eighty—we came to a pole gate with a sign that said “Far Canyon Ranch.” We pried open the gate and headed for the shiny tin roof of a barn that stuck up behind some bare trees. We crossed another shaky bridge and there by the barn we came across a man.

“Are you the Mr. McCloud with the ad?” my mom asked.

The man had looked a bit startled to see us come rattling across his bridge, but he nodded and said, “Yes,
ma'am.” He was in the middle of doing something to his tractor, so he put his tools down and wiped his hands on a red cloth. “Do you have any references?” he asked politely.

My mom shook her head. “No,” she said. “I quit my last job.”

Mr. McCloud took off his gray sweat-stained cowboy hat and scratched his dark wavy hair and asked, “Well, do you know how to irrigate?”

She didn't answer, just held out her hands, palms up, for him to see.

My mom has big hands, with long, thin fingers. And calluses and scratches all over from shoveling and doing all kinds of ranch work. Mr. McCloud put his own big calloused hands under hers and lifted them almost to his face so he could see them real close-up. I thought maybe he was going to read her fortune, he studied them so hard. Finally he turned her hands over and looked just as carefully at the backs of them. No rings, no watch. Lots of scratches from barbed wire. By then I knew she was thinking she'd have been better off saying some words, but it was too late.

“Yeah,” he said, giving her back her hands. “You do.” And he looked into her eyes.

I don't know if my mom would be considered pretty, maybe not. She's kind of skinny but real strong and her arms have muscles that ripple almost like a man's—although because it was spring and still cold she had on her old navy-blue coat with feathers sticking out all this
way and that where it'd been torn by barbed wire, so you couldn't really tell she had muscles. She doesn't do anything with her long, dark hair, so it's usually in her eyes, but she has eyes the color of a stormy sea, the kind of eyes that if you do look right into them you might find yourself drowning, they take you down so deep.

Mr. McCloud coughed and surfaced and said, “Sure looks like you can handle a shovel and do fence work. Can you caretake? Know a thing or two about calving?”

She gave him a look like, “What do you think?”

“Well, okay,” he said. “I like girl-help. Females are usually gentler with the animals and a darn sight more careful with things in general and they don't say they know how to do something when they really don't. Last hired man I had around here didn't know the hind end of a cow from its front. Plus he got the tractor stuck for six weeks in a swamp. I thought it'd sink clear down to China.” He glanced at Stew Pot, who'd jumped out of the cab and was now proudly perched on the tarp that covered the gypsy load in the back of our muddy truck. Then he turned and looked at me, sizing me up.

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.

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 the week before I turned five.