Lifting the Sky (3 page)

“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 around 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.

“This house has surely been enchanted,” I said as I stepped inside. “Like in a fairy tale where the spell's only broken when the maiden gets smooched by the prince.” I smirked.

“Don't go getting smart,” Mam said.

But my skin got all goose bumpy as I got my first look. I'd pictured much of the outside, but somehow I'd never imagined the inside. The mudroom was stuffy and cold and spiderwebs draped the small panes of the windows. I reached out to latch the open doors of a hutch that was crammed with cans of screws and nails and all sorts of tools and fencing supplies. An old pair of cowboy boots sagged in a corner beside a low table. It was a typical mudroom. I turned to Mam and gave her a big smile.

“Smells musty,” Mam said, pinching her nose. “Mr. McCloud was right. We might be better off in the bunkhouse.”

It suddenly struck me—what if the picture I'd drawn had only been
my
special place? What if it wasn't my mom's?

Silently we moved our gear from the windy porch into the mudroom. We looked at each other, and then Mam creaked open a door that led into a little dark hallway. There we found three other doors. Mam opened one. It led down to a cellar. She opened another. It led up a steep, narrow stairway to what looked like a sunshiny attic.

“A house of doorways,” Mam muttered as she opened the next door and stepped in.

“Entrances and exits and portals,” I said from behind her in my deepest, most mysterious voice. “And when new doorways open,
leap!
” And I bounded into the kitchen and stopped.

The kitchen was like a piece of fallen sky—all the shades of noon and dusk and morning. The cabinets and an old threadbare sofa and braided rug and the lamp that hung over the table were all different hues of blue. Cobalt-blue bottles stood on the counters and lined the windowsills.

“It's a blue room made for me 'cause I'm blue too,” I said, and I whirled around the table and crashed into a chair that then tumbled and crashed into another.
“Shhhh,”
I whispered to Stew Pot, who was used to getting blamed for things I did. “You'll wake the house.”

During the time the house was abandoned, a blanket of dust had covered everything. I sneezed at least twenty-six
times as I tiptoed across the wood floor and peeked into the next room.

It was a living room. A messy one. Everything had been pushed to one end of the room and piled up, with a trunk tucked under a table and a chair on top of that and a rolled-up rug on top of a couch that was pushed up against two worn leather chairs. Behind the jumble, on either side of a long narrow window, stood two built-in bookcases just loaded with books.

I scrambled over, yelling, “We've got books!” Never mind waking the house. I trailed my fingers along the dusty shelves, calling out, “Paperback Westerns. Mysteries. Romances. Books about Indian history and lore … old schoolbooks … and what looks like a whole set of old encyclopedias!”

“Mam'll gobble those up,” I said in a low voice to Pot. She was always trying to read and get smarter on account of not finishing high school.

With the furniture all jammed over on one end, there was a pathway to a latched double door. It squeaked as I pushed it open. The unfinished log addition was empty except for a wood stove in one corner and a ladder. The logs hadn't been chinked and wind blew through the spaces between them. I quickly snapped the door closed.

Another door off the living room led to a hallway with a room at each end. A tiny bathroom squeezed itself in between them. A hammer, some screwdrivers, and a can of screws lay on the bathroom floor, along with a set of towel racks still in their wrappers.

“We've got a job to do, but not one we can't handle,” I called back to Mam, and opened the door at one end of the hall.

On a snow-white floor stood a bed made of aspen, its posts rising up to clouds in a blue painted-sky ceiling. Everything—walls, dresser, chair, and table—sported coats of white paint. Not a scuff mark anywhere to be seen. The room looked as if it had been freshly painted and then barely touched. I twirled into it and plunked down on the quilted bedspread. Dust rose like clouds in the afternoon light.