Lifting the Sky

by Mackie d'Arge

  At the first really loud blast I’d run straight to the front door to let a shivering Stew Pot inside, and then I’d dashed to the pen where my bums trembled and stared at me wide-eyed. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I assured them, hugging them, thinking, Cripes, everything was so perfect. Why’d he have to go and do that?

  Between crackles and bangs I could hear my mom yelling and my dad shouting back, and then above it all rose a shriek that sent a cold shiver of dread running through me.

  Fire!

  I burst out of the pen as if something dangerous had broken into it. Forgot the gate, whirled, yanked it shut, and then kicked it open again with my foot. What if the fire got my bums?

  In the black night a thin line of orange crept up the hillside.

  I ran, stumbling up the porch stairs and into the kitchen. I jerked the mop bucket out from the cupboard under the sink and grabbed two saucepans off the stove, crashing a stack of plates onto the floor as I dashed out. Fast as I could with bucket and pots clanking at my side I clunked up toward the ditch that curved along the base of the hill—thank goodness it still carried water! Mam ripped the bucket and pots from my hands, so I flew over the ditch, stripping off my brand-new shirt as I ran, no matter that the buttons popped off. I frantically slapped my shirt at the sparks and stomped on the glowing embers with my brand-spanking-new boots. In the darkness I could hear my dad cursing in French, and his panting as he shoveled dirt onto the fiery patches.

  I don’t know how long we were at it. It took forever, it seemed, before we thankfully got the fire out.

  We were sooty and breathing so heavily we might’ve just run a marathon and boy was my mom ever mad. “You could’ve burned the place down,” Mam yelled breathlessly over her shoulder as she poured one last bucket of water onto the last still-smoking patch.

  Not a spark glimmered anywhere, but who knew what little troublemaker might lay there silently smoldering, just waiting to start up again during the night.

  “I aimed toward the irrigated meadows,” my dad said stiffly. “That is why I chose the spot by the fence.”

  Mam said something inaudible under her breath.

  “All I wished was to celebrate my little girl’s birthday. And yes, Bastille Day. Other than this little fire, was it not magnificent?”

  He nudged me on the shoulder and I couldn’t help but smile into the darkness. “It was stupendous,” I said. “Out-of-this-world fantastic.”

  I didn’t dare look at Mam.

  “So little damage,” my dad went on. “A dry hillside. So what? The grass was no good anyway. Only scrub. Sagebrush.”

  Honestly, I thought Mam would explode and take off whirling across the night sky. Sparks flew out of her, something I’d never seen happen before, at least not with her. “Only!” she sputtered. “Only? This is the ranch I’m in charge of! You could’ve lost me my job! And I still might lose it…”

  “The way you move around, what would that matter?”

  I wanted to throw myself in between them, yell Stop. Please. Stop! I could feel my world crumbling, feel everything falling apart. We’d just had a fine dinner. Just watched a spectacular show. Just kept a disaster from growing much worse…

  But my mom had streaked off ahead of us. My dad and I trudged silently back to the house. I was trying hard not to cry.

  “Now what?” my mom said when we shuffled into the kitchen.

  “Now what, what?” my dad asked.

  “It’s late. What do you plan to do?”

  There was a long, sticky silence.

  “I will sleep under the stars in the back of my truck. That way,” my dad said, winking at me as if it were all a big joke, “I can keep an eye on things. Don’t you agree, little mouse?”

  I wished I really was a little mouse. Wished I had a mouse hole to creep into.

  My dad stayed for breakfast. He even fixed it.

  “No one cooks eggs like ze French,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows as he searched through the cupboards. “What? No hearts of artichokes? No anchovies? Not a snail in the house?” He twirled an imaginary mustache. “No frog legs? How can I cook?” He opened the fridge and sifted through our leftovers, holding up each new find as if it might bite. I giggled, and even Mam seemed to be trying hard not to smile.

  He niftily chop-chop-chop-chopped an onion, holding up a knuckle as he pretended to have sliced off a finger. He cracked eggs with one hand and talked ten miles a minute as he stirred them. Holding one hand behind his back, he flicked the pan and flipped the omelet over. He made each of us our own. It was so wildly weird and wonderful to have an actual dad cooking up a meal in our kitchen. Mam was an okay cook, but she didn’t do tricks.

  No one said a word about the fire.

  My mom was awfully quiet, but then when wasn’t she? My dad told a story about a horse he’d trained at a ranch where he’d worked, how he’d taught it to do tricks so that it appeared that the horse could add and subtract and whisper things in his ears. And about how the horse had gone on to make its real owner a gigantic fortune.

  “He can still charm the skin off a snake,” Mam said when my dad stepped outside for a smoke. She folded her napkin and sighed. “I just hope he doesn’t slip the skin on and turn into one….” She looked at me and sighed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t talk about him like that in front of you. But the next thing you know, he’ll be sweet-talking me, saying that what happened last night was nothing. But it wasn’t just this ranch that could’ve burned to the ground. It was the whole countryside. Our Indian neighbors…”

  “But maybe he’s changed,” I said, flinging her a warning look as the floor in the mudroom creaked.

  “I am so sorry for the little problem last night.” My dad leaned on the doorframe, filling the space. “What can I do to help?”

  Mam and I glanced at each other. I wiggled a finger. “Told you so,” I mouthed.

  “You’ve done more than enough,” Mam said. “I don’t need help. I’ve managed for years without it.”

  My dad looked at his watch. He must have important things to do somewhere, I thought.

  “I could use help.” I piped up. Obviously it was all up to me now. If I didn’t find something to keep him around, for sure he’d take off before they’d had time to make up. I’d take him out to help me with my bums and then send him back to spend time with my mom. I rushed about filling bottles, then steered my dad out the door. Luckily the calves were still there—I’d plumb forgotten to close up their pen after I’d kicked the gate open just in case the fire had spread.

  When I’m nervous I chatter away nonstop, and now I went on and on about how little the bums had been when I got them and how Mr. Mac hadn’t thought they’d survive and yet he’d handed them over to me the very first morning, and then how he’d been so surprised to see how great—and I suddenly stopped in midsentence. My dad’s mouth had turned down and he’d puckered his eyebrows.

  “This ‘Mr. Mac.’ He must be very, very nice, yes?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “He lets you have his big house. This is a bit strange, no?”

  “No one had lived here for ages….”

  My dad kept at it. “Does he spend much time here?”

  I shook my head. “We hardly ever see him. He never comes out.” I had to change the subject real fast. “But tell me, Papa,” I blurted. “Do you still heal horses?”

  Suddenly he got all sunny again. “So you’ve heard about that! Ah, oui, I have—how do you call it, a knack.” He shrugged. “It was to my advantage when I worked training horses, but I no longer spend my time doing that. It was for me a matter of—how do you say?—directing my attention to one thing. The same way I had the great desire, the big dream, when I was a small child in Paris, to go to the land of the cowboys. I put all my attention on teaching myself to do rope tricks. I learned English by memorizing all the old cowboy songs. I had a good success with horses, but I got very bored working with animals so I am finished with that.
Now I put my mind to other things. Like the film. Yes?”

  I fed and groomed my bums as he went on about the film and the cameras he needed to buy and I don’t know what all else because I started thinking about what he’d said about directing his attention to one thing. Maybe we had that in common, this knack of centering in on something and making our dreams become real. I just hoped that I didn’t ever get so bored with something I was good at that I just up and left.

  He was still talking as we walked out by the homestead cabin. There, he turned in a circle as he looked at the landscape around us. I took a deep breath, as if I could somehow breathe in this land of enchantment and beauty, and by breathing it in, hold it inside me. Isn’t this place out of this world? I started to say when he spoke.

  “Do you not get bored out here? Are you not lonely in this desolate place, so far from shopping, from restaurants and theaters?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I shrugged. “You’ve lived on ranches,” I said. “Did you get lonely?”

  “Ah, that was different. Dude ranches, there is always someone around, people coming from all over the world, and they all want to be entertained. But out here…” He shook his head and then lit a cigarette. “Your mother. She must get lonely,” he said as he blew out a long sigh of smoke.

  I shrugged. “Same as me, I guess. You’d have to ask her. She’s up at dawn and in bed when the sun goes down. She studies a lot, and we read at the table. She doesn’t talk much. But she’s so good at what she does. And,” I added, looking up at the sky, “she really likes being her own boss.”

  My dad’s eyebrows crashed into each other. “So she likes being the boss, huh? Well, there is only room for one pair of pants in my closet.” He tossed his cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with his boot.

  I pinched my lips together. Shoot. What’d made me say that? Maybe … maybe I was testing the water to see if I could really dive in and swim off with this father whom I barely knew. Not, of course, that he’d asked me to come with him. And not that he’d even mentioned some kind of future together.

  We looked up as the front door slammed. “I’m heading down to the barn,” Mam called when she saw us.

  “Go with her,” I said. My dad shrugged and held up his hand for her to wait.

  “Same old pickup,” I heard him say as he climbed into the truck.

  I don’t know what my parents talked about. They were gone a long time, but when they came back they seemed to be getting along just fine. My dad whistled a tune and my mom’s eyes didn’t hold the angry glare they’d had almost the whole time since he’d been here. I squinted, trying to catch some pretty pink lights floating around either one of them. I thought I caught a quick glimpse of rosy light around my mom, but as soon as I saw it, it changed.

  I’d fixed a peanut butter and honey sandwich while they were gone. Now my dad teased me. “Even when you were small as a mouse, you loved peanut butter,” he said. “With honey it must be very good, but have you ever tried it with chocolate?”

  Maybe if I could do things over, I wouldn’t have had what I had for lunch. Because then my dad wouldn’t have decided to give me what he called a “taste treat” by grating some chocolate onto my sandwich. He wouldn’t have exclaimed that I hadn’t lived until I’d tried the European version of peanut butter. It was something called Nutella, he said. It was just like peanut butter only so much better because it was made with hazelnuts and dark chocolate.

  And I wouldn’t have said, “Oh, I’d love to try some of that!”

  And then he wouldn’t have gone off to try to find some. Wouldn’t have grabbed his hat, given Mam a long, steady look as if trying to memorize her, or to see if she cared that he left. His colors swirled around him with bright pretty yellows and blues floating up over his head, while Mam’s lights suddenly turned spiky. My dad kissed my forehead and said, “I’ll be right back, little mouse.” And then he walked out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  If a raven flies by my window by the time I count to fifty, my dad will come back today.

  I lay slumped in my bed, counting, dragging the numbers out. At forty-nine a black bird flew by. I raced to the window and poked my head out. It was a raven! I plopped back onto my bed, blew my hair off my forehead. “He’d better come back,” I muttered to myself. “If he doesn’t…” I punched my pillow with my fist and turned it to the cool side.

  It was the morning of day six since he’d left.

  The first couple of days I’d buzzed about expecting his truck to come rumbling up any second. By day three I’d started dragging about, barely lifting my feet off the ground. It felt like a heavy gray cloud had settled around me, turning the world dreary and taking its colors away.

  On the next bed, the doll stared wide-eyed at the doorway as if expecting her prince to show up any minute. “Don’t get your hopes up,” I muttered, punching my pillow again.

  Why’d he saddle me with a doll as big as a barrel, for cripe’s sake. How could she possibly fit in our pickup? She’d take up half the seat, and a princess is way too fancy to stick in the back. I bet she cost a small fortune. What was he thinking? Hadn’t he kept track of the years that’d gone by since he’d left us the first time?

  The first time. What kind of dad walks out the door twice? I could feel the anger inside me growing and filling me up. I tried to remember what Mam had said before I stormed off to bed last night. “It’s just the way he is…. Don’t take it personally.”

  But I did. I was furious. I’d about driven Mam mad with my raging and stomping about. It didn’t help that she seemed to keep her own anger all bottled up deep inside. I wondered what would happen if ever she came uncorked.

  Downstairs the door banged as Mam headed out. Stew Pot opened one eye but didn’t budge from his beanbag.

  Was my buddy getting old? I counted backward. Eleven? Twelve? I’d read somewhere that big dogs got older sooner than small ones. Lately he’d been having trouble jumping up into the back of the truck. I felt a big lump grow in my throat. What good did it do to worry about stuff I couldn’t change or do one thing about?

  Like my dad being the way he was. Don’t take it personally, I thought. It’s just how he is. Yeah, right. I lay in bed trying to think of all the good things about him. Like the bubbly way he told stories. And the stuff he came up with, like setting off fireworks—though of course that’d almost ended in disaster. But then the comical stuff he did—why, even Mam hadn’t been able to keep a smile off her face as she’d watched him do that funny French chef act. And he was so handsome it made my heart ache.

  That’s what he did to me. Made my heart ache. My tall, handsome, heartbreaking dad. And he’d done it so easily. Just breezed in and then out the door. Had he gone clear to France to find that stupid chocolate stuff? I spit out the word. “Nutella.” It made me gag. Same as the word “Dijon.” Maybe I hadn’t understood what was going on when I was little, but now!

  I could feel the anger building up like a big fire burning inside me, feel myself getting so hot I thought I’d explode. WHERE ON EARTH ARE YOU? I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. How could you walk into my life again and then turn around and walk out?

  I stared at the cracked mirror across from my bed. Someone really angry must’ve thrown something at it, but I bet they’d been nowhere near as furious as me. I shoved my hand under my bed and jerked out my just-in-case box. Grabbed a soup can. “TAKE THAT!” I yelled, and I threw it as hard as I could at the mirror. Pot gave a yelp, shot up from the beanbag, and dove to the far side of the room. He crouched by the wall, his worried tail thump-thumping apologies on the wood floor.

  “Oh, Pot, I’m so sorry,” I cried. “I’m not mad at you!” I patted my bed and he bounded up into my arms.

  I looked at the mess I’d made. Jagged pieces of mirror lay scattered across the wood floor, along with the dented soup can. I hid my face in Pot’s furry shoulder and begged him to forgive me for scaring him so. The horrible thing was that
my huge, hungry wanting was ripping me right down the middle. I felt so divided. I mean, how could I want something so much—for my dad to come back—but at the very same time regret it now that he had? What was it that I really wanted? And Mam? Yesterday I’d watched her pick up the telephone and then stand there staring at it. I was sure my dad hadn’t left her a number or else she would’ve called him by now, so she must’ve been thinking of calling Mr. Mac. But she hadn’t. She’d held the phone to her chest, sighed, and then put it back down.

  And as if things weren’t bad enough, she’d drunk up the rest of the wine. Two bottles, all by herself. I hadn’t made it easier. Even poor Stew Pot had slunk about hiding under the table or the couch or in the bathroom, anywhere to get away from my ranting.

  Every afternoon I’d hiked up the hill, my heart leaping ahead of me, fingers crossed, hoping and praying that at least one happy thing would happen that day. Stew Pot would lope ahead of me wagging his tail expectantly. And then the big letdown for both of us. No Shawn.

  I’d walk past my tree and jump over the rocky ledge and then climb partway down the back side of the hill. I stared down by the pine tree, checking for a pile of manure or some hoof marks that would mean Tivo had been there. He hadn’t. I’d climb slowly back up and walk to the other side of the hill and stand there with my hand shading my eyes, searching for some sign of my dad. No dust rose on the long road to the ranch. No one traveled it, no one at all.

  Now, in my bedroom, I looked over Pot’s shoulder at the slivers of glass and the dented soup can. A pool of tomato soup had spurted out on the floor. It looked like blood. I shivered and hugged Stew Pot so tightly he coughed.

  At noontime Mam stomped into the kitchen. “Turn down that drumming and singing,” she said, throwing her gloves on the counter. “Doesn’t it get on your nerves?”

  I got up from the table and clicked off the radio without saying a word.

  She picked up her latest encyclopedia and slammed it down on the table. All my dad’s roses let go of their petals at once. We stared at the blackish red piles. Mam jerked the stems out of the cobalt-blue bottles and stuffed them into the trash can by the sink. Then she turned on the faucet and reached for her white china teapot. Both of us winced as she banged it down in the sink. For a minute I thought she might cry.