Lifting the Sky

by Mackie d'Arge

  I put on some fresh clothes and rushed to check out the rundown homestead cabin next to the house. Sure enough, it’d been chinked the old-fashioned way. I pried between the logs to see what they’d used back in the old days. Crumpled-up newspapers had been crammed into the spaces between the big cracks. The chink looked like it’d been made out of clay mixed with straw. I rubbed a piece of the chink between my fingers. It was the same color as the hillside not far from the house.

  I grabbed a bucket from the kitchen and skipped off to the purple hill. Sure enough, it was the kind of dirt that turned into nice gluey clay. I scooped up a bunch and then buzzed about rounding up straw and old newspapers. I hauled my stash through the kitchen and plopped it on the floor in the add-on.

  I made me a sign.

  BLOOMING ROOM

  PRIVATE! NO PEEKING!

  I tacked it onto the door and closed it behind me so Mam wouldn’t come in and ask questions. I was ready to start my new project. A gust of wind blasted between the cracks, lifting dust, bits of hay, and newspapers. The wind died down, and I started stuffing the cracks.

  Chapter Ten

  I couldn’t believe it. “No way,” I muttered as I felt Wonder Baby’s leg once again. No lump. No bump. No airy spike poking my hand. And her lights looking almost normal.

  “Not even possible,” I said as I let the calf go and watched as she chased after her twin to the end of the pen.

  I wrinkled my forehead, feeling really confused. Maybe Wonder Baby’s leg hadn’t really been broken. Maybe I had just imagined the bumps. Was it just wishful thinking?

  In my head I did a little figuring. Today was the twenty-fourth. We’d hired on at the ranch on May ninth and the bums had been born the next day. So two weeks. A broken bone couldn’t possibly heal in two weeks. But if it had, then something amazing had happened.

  The rest of the morning passed in a daze. How I got the last of my schoolwork done I don’t know. What I put down on my tests is a mystery. But I finished up and got everything stuffed into a big envelope and ready to mail back to my school, and then I sat at the table drumming my fingers.

  “Something made the bone heal …,” I said out loud to the room and the broom and the lightbulb.

  “What’d you say?” Mam’s words pulled me out of my haze.

  “I said I need a hike up the hill.” I could feel my face getting red. I couldn’t just blurt it out, could I? Wonder Baby’s broken leg healed! Right. In two weeks? Frankly, I hardly believed it myself—how could I expect someone else to?

  “Well, you’re done! You deserve a break,” Mam said as she picked up the envelope and weighed it in her hands. “We’ll go get this mailed off tomorrow. And guess what? We’ve got a full ditch of water! The beavers are getting lazy, I think. I’ve actually got a bit of spare time on my hands.” She grunted as she lifted her latest, biggest, fattest encyclopedia, the M. “Think I’ll grab me a cuppa tea, go curl up with this giant, and see what he can teach me.”

  A cool breeze made me roll down my sleeves as Stew Pot and I slipped through the fence. I hurried straight up to my tree, shrugged out of my pack, and settled back against the trunk. Stew Pot curled up beside me.

  I stared out at the blue-forever sky and listened to the sound of the wind and the creek. Sometimes I felt so full of sky I could burst. What was happening to me? I wondered. I seemed to have entered into a whole different dimension from the moment I stepped into this place. Were all the lights brighter here, or was it something inside me that had changed? Had Wonder Baby’s leg really healed? Was it something I’d done? Sure, I’d read about miracles happening, but they all seemed to have happened long ago. Which, of course, didn’t mean that they hadn’t happened … But still. I scrunched up my face something terrible just thinking about it all.

  I was thinking so hard that I didn’t even notice the herd of pronghorns gathering on the hillside below me. “Shhh,” I whispered to Pot. I snapped my fingers and pointed to the ground, which was the sign for him to stay low and stay put. Which, being a good ranch doggie, he did. He hunkered right down and lay with his head on his paws, looking straight ahead as if he were pretending the antelope didn’t exist.

  I reached for my pack and pulled out my journal and pencils. I picked out the antelope I’d named Lone One and drew her staring up at me while the rest of the herd calmly grazed. Then I rummaged through my pencils for the gold one and shaded in the fuzzy light that shone out of her and out of the others. I studied them some more and added a rosy pink to the light around the fat-bellied does.

  I squinted. Something else was going on here—something I hadn’t noticed before. I could see silvery-blue lines linking each antelope to the next one. And to the next and the next … I studied the lines for the longest time and then drew what I saw. It looked like golden antelopes caught in a silvery web.

  Lights of the Herd All Connected, I wrote.

  Then I drew silvery-blue lines connecting the herd to the sagebrush and to the rocks and the hills and the trees, and I drew shimmering light around all of them and up in a corner I drew a glowing Stew Pot and me and my tree, and then I drew lines linking everything all together.

  I concentrated on drawing Lone One. While I sketched I noticed my fingers, how the light streaked out of them, and how just by thinking about Lone One made the light in my fingers grow brighter.

  I stared at my hands and then down at the herd. Really, what is it that I am seeing? I wondered. The lights seemed to be some sort of energy that flowed from one object or animal to another. If I’d learned one thing about light as I sketched the herd, it was that everything was connected.

  Everything Light and Everything Connected, I labeled my drawing.

  I’d noticed before that people’s lights changed, so it seemed that whenever someone had a new thought their lights changed to match it. I’d seen how the light flowed from my hands to the calves. And if thoughts could affect the lights, could the lights affect how a body felt?

  Just thinking about all that made my head swim. I gathered my pencils and journal and pushed myself to my feet. Shadows had crept over the hillsides and the wind whirred through the feathery leaves of the juniper. I shivered, wishing I’d brought my jacket. Down by the creek a coyote yipped and another one answered from the hills. The buck antelope snorted, and suddenly the entire herd and their lights turned as one and flowed across the hillside like a fast-moving golden wave.

  Looking down, I noticed a shiny white rock that seemed to outshine its neighbors. As I picked it up I swear I could feel its energy tickling the palm of my hand—a perfect wishing rock. I closed my eyes. How many wishes can I stuff into one stone? I wondered. There was the big wish for my dad to find us. And then for my mom to be happy and want to stay for a while in one place. And for Wonder Baby’s leg to really, really be healed …

  I tucked the stone into a curlicue branch. “Thank you,” I whispered for what the herd’s lights had just taught me, and that was my total prayer.

  That night after supper, my mom and I sat hunched over our books at the kitchen table eating peanut butter cookies and drinking some of Mam’s medicinal tea (good for relaxing, she said). She’d made the cookies special for me to celebrate getting my schoolwork all done. Above the table, the cobalt-blue lampshade glowed like a lonesome blue planet against our painted-sky ceiling. The kitchen was quiet. The radio had been nothing but static so I’d clicked it off, and the fridge for once wasn’t humming. I’d been reading the same paragraph over and over. Finally I pushed my book to the side and leaned with both elbows on the table.

  “What would you think if I said I thought Wonder Baby’s leg was already healed?” I said into the drowsy silence.

  Mam didn’t look up from her book. “That’s impossible,” she said. She took a sip of her tea and kept reading.

  “Well, maybe. But I took her cast off today and she’s hopping about with no sign that her leg was ever broken.”

  “How long has it been? Two weeks? I don’t thi
nk a bone could heal that quickly. I saw what it was like when we brought her in.” Mam reached across the table and patted my hand. “It was a bad break. To tell the truth, I didn’t think the calf would survive.”

  We sat there not talking. Stew Pot made little sounds as he dreamed under the table. I pulled my book toward me, but the words still wouldn’t stick in my head. I snapped the book closed again.

  Mam peered over at me. She stuck her napkin in her book for a place mark. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with those calves,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. “What’s been going on?”

  “Those lights,” I said, wondering how to go about explaining something when I didn’t fully understand it myself. “Remember how, when I was little, I used to tell you about the lights around stuff? And we thought it was a problem with my eyes? Well, the lights haven’t gone away. Far from it. They’ve gotten stronger.”

  Mam rolled her eyes at me. “I remember. You used to look at me sometimes as if weeds sprouted out of my ears. Actually, you still do…”

  “You’ve got yellow light sticking out of your head right now,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not weeds. Hay, maybe, or straw…” I took a breath. “So I see lights around everything and I know you’ve said you don’t see them, but I don’t think it’s anything wrong with my eyes anymore. I think I’m even figuring out how to—” I broke off. It seemed strange to be talking about the lights as if they were something out of the ordinary. But then a thought occurred. Even if Mam couldn’t see the lights, maybe other people could?

  I took a deep breath. “I think I’m figuring out how to work with the lights.”

  “What do you mean?” Mam said, frowning down at her cup.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “it all began when I noticed lights in Mr. Mac’s hands when he stroked the calves that first morning at the barn. Then I looked at my own lights, the ones coming out of my fingers. Later Wonder Baby’s lights got really weak that first day after I got her fed and washed up. And it struck me that maybe I could make her lights grow stronger—or maybe I mean brighter—by thinking really hard. Concentrating, right? So I did, I concentrated with my lights, and it must’ve worked, because pretty soon her lights changed.”

  Mam wrinkled her forehead but nodded wisely, as if that made some kind of sense. Encouraged, I went on.

  “It seemed that the more I wanted to heal the calves, and the more I showered them with love, the better it worked.”

  “Intention,” Mam said, waving her cup in the air as if yes, indeed, it all did make perfect sense. “That’s like having a goal, a target. Some way to direct what you’re aiming to do.” Tea splashed on the table as she set the cup down. She dabbed at the puddle and said, “I wish your dad could be here to hear about what you’re doing. In spite of his faults, he was good with animals. He sang to the horses as he worked with them, and lots of people said he had a gift for healing.”

  My heart jumped and I stared at her. She hadn’t mentioned my dad since—I couldn’t remember. She’d for sure never mentioned that he had—what had she called it? A gift for healing.

  Honestly, I hadn’t even thought of what my dad would think. I’d get this huge ache when I did think about him, so I tried hard not to. That worked okay when I was busy, but not at all when I wasn’t.

  Last time we’d touched on the touchy subject of my dad, Mam had said, “Don’t be silly. No way was it your fault that he left.”

  I was almost five when it happened.

  He slammed out the door just as we sat down for supper. “I’m going to get mustard,” he said. It was the longest suppertime ever. We waited. It wasn’t till the next morning that my mom got the table cleared off. She called the hospitals and the sheriff, but I think in her heart she knew that he’d left. It wasn’t long after that when I first noticed my mom’s long silences, almost like her words had gotten jammed up in her throat and couldn’t get loose.

  As the years went by she started making a joke about those mustard words, saying, “What can you expect? He was French, and we were out of Dijon.” When I asked her about it once she said it was all apples and oranges. I tossed that around, trying to make sense of it, until she finally explained. “If your dad hadn’t left, I probably would have.” But something in the way she said it made me think that they were Band-Aid words to cover up a big hurt.

  When the emptiness fills my heart and I feel like I don’t have a body big enough to hold it, she reminds me that it wasn’t me he left. He left her, she says, but I can’t see the difference. He never did come back. He did write a few letters—at least seven of them actually found us. Mam read some parts of his letters to me, but other parts she kept secret.

  “At least he’s alive,” she’d said after the first letter. “And he says he misses his little mouse.”

  Back then, when I was five, those words had made me clap and dance around singing, “Papa misses his little mouse!”

  Later, when we got the second letter, she’d said, “He says he’s coming back!” But with each day that passed and he didn’t return she got quieter.

  I still remember the long dark nights of that winter, and the days stretching out blank and white as I watched the snow fall and waited, and he didn’t come. When the fields turned green once again the third letter came. Mam said, “He says something came up. He’s been busy with a new project. When he finishes, he’ll come find us. And of course he says he misses his little mouse.”

  But he never did come back. Maybe he’d come looking for us and we’d already moved on. Or he might’ve sent more letters that we never got. He might’ve searched for us and given up when he couldn’t find us. I wanted to think that he did. But of course we never left a forwarding address because it was then that my mom started hitting the road. A few more letters did somehow find us, the last one about three years ago. Mam had stuffed that letter into her box of secrets and only told me that he had so many projects going on in his life that he didn’t have time for us. It was around then that she had what she later called her “fleeting affair” with a cowboy from New Mexico—the one with a wife and three kids that he somehow forgot to tell her about. It’s a wonder she didn’t break his head with the skillet she threw at him. She’s got real good aim.

  With a start I came back to the present. I beamed over at her. “I never knew that about my dad. That he was good at healing. I do wonder what he would’ve thought.”

  “He would’ve been proud.” Then, her voice so low that I had to lean forward to hear, she said, “You’ve got a good head on you, Blue. Don’t ever let your heart get in the way of your studies.”

  “What do you mean?” I stared into my blue enamel cup as if the answer to my question might be hidden in the tea leaves on the bottom.

  “Anton rode like a dream,” she said—how long had it been since she’d last said my dad’s name? “He was the best-looking man on a horse I’d ever seen.”

  “Love at first sight, huh?” I studied the tea leaves, my nose on the rim of the cup.

  “I was only sixteen.” She smiled a half smile, and for a minute I thought she wouldn’t go on.

  “It was my second summer working at that dude ranch up near Cody, cleaning cabins and wrangling, helping to bring in thirty or forty horses from the pastures, then saddling them up for the dudes for their trail rides. He was—” She stopped.

  I grabbed the rim of the cup with my mouth and raised my head. I felt like I was two years old and begging for a bedtime story. Tell me, I wanted to say. Instead I mumbled into the cup. “He was what?”

  “He was fresh from France and living out what he liked to call his ‘Western Dream.’ Seems he’d imagined being a cowboy all his life, a passion, I suppose, that he got from movies and books. I was too shy to even talk to him, but I liked to watch how he handled the horses. He’d sing to them, and once in a while he’d look up and smile. Back then, I would’ve walked miles for a smile.”

  I put my cup back on the table and picked up a spoon and
stirred, even though it was empty.

  “The reason they’d hired him,” she went on, “other than the fact that he rode like a dream and could rope—although that was mainly for show—was his great repertoire of old cowboy songs. He sang those with hardly a trace of an accent. The way he played the guitar and sang for the dudes around the campfire at night made mush out of my insides.” She laughed a short, stiff laugh, as if not believing she could’ve been so taken in.

  As if not believing she was actually telling me this.

  “It was an honor when later I got asked to sing along with him. They’d heard me singing while cleaning the cabins, I guess.” She smiled at the memory. “Someone thought it would be romantic to have us serenading each other around the campfire at night. And it was. The guests loved it.”

  I reached across the table, lifted the teapot, and refilled both our cups. I folded my paper napkin and unfolded it and spread it out flat on the table and then folded it into triangles.

  “Perhaps if his visa hadn’t been about to expire,” Mam said, “and then everything else…”

  The “everything else” was the fact that her parents and younger brother had died in a car crash in her next-to-last year of school. It was years before I learned that she’d been driving her family back to their house after a school play when it happened. Her little brother had been dressed as a fat red tomato. He was still wearing his costume when a drunk rammed into their truck.

  After the accident, the Frenchman she’d had a big crush on was all in the world that she had to cling to.

  “Well, I married him and his visa expired and he got to stay in the States,” she said, taking a breath to steady herself. “After a baby and a few rough years, he told me that his dreams had been taken off course by our marriage.”

  “But that wasn’t your fault,” I said. Funny how we had to keep telling each other how we weren’t to blame.