Lifting the Sky (5 page)

“I don't know, Miss Blue,” Mr. Mac said as we settled the calves back into their nest. “It'll be mighty tricky. They're even weaker than I'd thought. You check on that leg and put a fresh wrap on it as the calf grows. It'll take quite a while for this leg to set.” He hesitated. “I'm putting a big load on you. Sure you'll be able to deal with all this?”

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.

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.

“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.